Paper reinforcers

meticulous: showing great attention to detail; very careful and precise

fiddling: annoyingly trivial and petty

I spent a disturbing amount of my puberty putting paper reinforcers on the holes of college-ruled notebook paper. This started as early as eighth grade when I attended a small, evangelical Christian school in Chesapeake, Virginia. While the school’s curriculum included a number of unofficial yet unfortunate topics (ie: how Catholics are idolators, why dating isn’t Christian, etc.), I came to appreciate its emphasis on primary-source documents and the development of notes and resources by the student that would then become a resource/textbook. Maybe it stemmed out of a need to save money, but “your notebook is your textbook,” they would always say. With this in mind, I would convince my mother to drive me to OfficeMax at the Janaf Shopping Center in Norfolk where I would think and mull over which folder or tab system would be best for which subject. Always ready in my well-organized Jansport backpack was a roll of paper hole reinforcers, White Out, and various shapes and sizes of Post-It notes. Oh, and who could forget the mini stapler and the matching, very necessary mini staple remover? Needless to say, I was poked fun of by my friends for my quirky concern with office supplies.

And this was just office supplies. I would also go through phases in school where I decided to suddenly alter my penmanship. I went through the phase of writing in tiny CAPS before moving onto a Frankenstein hybrid of print and cursive that I thought seemed more adult. As if the penmanship was more important than the words going onto the paper – the college-ruled, hole-reinforced paper.

That was then.

My love of the Internet and technology has ushered in an entirely new way of obsessing over and tweaking my systems. I recently read David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done.” As someone perceived to have so much potential and yet hopelessly prone to procrastinating and missing deadlines, I am always in search of something to save me from myself. I approached GTD out of the same desperation. Many of Allen’s concepts blew me away – I had lots of aha moments and lightbulbs. Yet I still spent an inordinate amount of time tweaking and fiddling with my Evernote, with tags and saved searches, to set it up as a digital GTD system. I even had a friend bring a box of plain manila folders over from the U.S. for my paper reference/filing system because I just wasn’t into the folders here in The Netherlands.

Tags and file taxonomies and GMail labels – these have become my paper reinforcers and White Out and file tabs. I am still doing the same thing and letting the same behaviors mask problems and confidence issues I have lurking underneath all of this seeming “organization.”

I come from a family of attention-deficit folks. My father, my brother, my uncle, and probably countless others are textbook “ADHD” and have been diagnosed as such. I have never been diagnosed nor have I sought out doctors to tell me either way. Young girls weren’t diagnosed with ADD or ADHD as often as boys when I was in middle and high school. If you were a daydreaming girl who couldn’t focus or stay on task, you were deemed lazy or told to “get your head out of the clouds.” I always seemed to be on task, seemed to be busy focusing and working to the untrained eye, but any close inspection (which my teachers never did) would have revealed a serious problem. I did not have trouble focusing, but rather found it impossible to focus on the right thing when I needed to. I can cook a big meal from start to finish and not forget an ingredient. I can knit a pair of baby mittens while listening to a podcast. However, ask me to meet a writing deadline after I’ve finished the interview and I shut down. I’m not ready. I’m still thinking. I’m still brainstorming and figuring out my lede. Ask me to sit down and write that unit plan, the one I’ve been googling and saving links for, the one I’ve been jotting down notes on legal pads for, and again I shut down. I’m not ready. I’m too busy thinking and trying to plan before I plan before I plan. These behaviors are problematic for someone who has an affinity for jobs that require grown-up homework (journalist, teacher).

I came to think about all of these issues while listening to one of my favorite new podcasts. At first blush it would seem to have nothing to do with my life and work, but “Back to Work” with Merlin Mann & Dan Benjamin seems to speak loudly and clearly to my current situation and the way I approach my work and creativity. These are two guys that seem a world away from my life as a teacher, but I can’t help but identify with them. In many ways it’s a superficial connection – I’m a nerd and enjoy the geeky banter, strange facts and movie references that pepper the conversations. I’m also a Mac geek like the both of them. But more than these, I identify with the hunger to create something and the many, many things that can distract and keep you from doing just that if you allow them to.

I just started listening to this podcast, so I’m a bit behind on the episodes. In the most recent episode I listened to, Merlin Mann said that “no one has ever thought a novel into existence.” He rambled on about how the brain and the gut can do a lot to discourage our hand from making something (and I mean ramble in a very good way). He clearly admires writers like Don Murray and Natalie Goldberg and references them often, in connection with writing of course, but also in creating anything. I too came to love Don Murray for the way he framed writing as an approachable practice – it is something you have to practice to get good at. Before he died, he wrote every single day. If a writer stops writing, she is no longer a writer. Anyone can write, but to be a writer, you have to sit down and write. You can’t just think about writing and expect a piece of work to appear. Seems simple, right?

Writing is another activity I avoid – a creative process for which I find countless justifications for not engaging in – because I am afraid of the permanence and finality of having something on paper or screen. With my students, we write in journals every day and practice the act of freewriting – of letting your hand just move across the page, without editing. I tell my students that they can save a piece of writing or throw it away – it doesn’t matter, because it is the act of doing it that is important. However, I also understand how difficult that can be for some of them. This is my own complex, but yet it is something that connects me to those students as they sit down to write. Some get this concept easily while others need support, encouragement and coaxing to move toward a regular writing practice. They need to practice writing if they ever hope to slough the fear of writing. I am not there yet myself.

One of my favorite quotes is by E.M. Forster who pondered “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” That to me is one of the things that can be so intimidating about writing. You may not truly understand yourself until you get things down on the paper or the screen and maybe there’s a reason you avoid doing that – maybe there are things you aren’t ready to understand about yourself. Julia Cameron and her recommendation of “Morning Pages” – of writing three pages every morning, long-hand – approaches writing as near-therapy.

These memories are bubbling to the surface as I think about my students. Those few students who, like myself, are painfully organized and enjoy using highlighters and Post-It notes, only to miss out on the messy, real learning that can go on if you just let go. One of my favorite comedians  is Marc Maron. He joked once on his podcast that he visited a friend’s house only to find the friend’s house was extremely clean and organized – every little thing in its place. Maron chuckled and asked “So what are you running from?”

I struggle. I concentrate too much on getting the system just right that I miss out on the opportunities to create somehting with the system. Right now I am thinking and thinking about units and what to do with my students, but avoiding putting anything down on paper. I am letting my mind run wild as my hands sit idle – as the creating muscles atrophy.

I’m just beginning to analyze my perfectionism and procrastination as a sign of something deeper. An apprehensiveness about making mistakes. And when you’re a teacher, mistakes are par for the course. As a teacher, you take time getting to know students, their learning differences and interests so that you can meet students where they are and help them stretch and grow. And, now and again, you make mistakes. You select texts that bomb. You assume students know something only to realize mid-lesson they don’t and then you need to reteach it. You have your “off” days.

I am walking into this new year with goals in mind, hoping they aren’t too pie-in-the-sky or unachievable. I plan to sit down with students and have a discussion about what we all want out of this learning experience. I’ve been reading through “The First Days of School” based on rave reviews from teachers. While I understand the need for procedures – and I will certainly have them – I am more interested in getting to know these kids first than in scaring them into submission with lists and policies. It’s important that I see who has the messy bookbag and who is fiddling with organizing papers rather than paying attention. These observations are just as important as responses on surveys and paragraphs about summer vacations and writing diagnostics. And it is important that they learn who I am, faults and all. Building trust and community is my goal. But first, I must create learning experiences that will allow this all to happen naturally. I must commit them to paper and shake that feeling of permanence and remind myself: every lesson is a draft.

I’ve started grad school…

This week I started life as a student again. Like riding a bike!

This week I started course work through Michigan State University’s online program toward my Master of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET).

I’ve realized over the course of my brief but intense teaching career that technology in learning is something I want to know more about. I’d been asked by many why I didn’t just get my Masters in Education when I got my license since I already had a degree under my belt (and the classes were the same), but at the time it didn’t seem like something I wanted to pay extra for. At this moment I have no aspirations of being an administrator (though it seems that every back is wearing a target in education these days) and a Masters of Education seemed like a stepping stone towards that and little more. I’d toyed with the idea of getting a graduate degree in something more content focused, such as history or media or even literature again, but none of those grabbed me.

I am an English teacher, but I always felt a little too interdisciplinary for the English department. I liked to walk around, talk to other teachers, and daydream about collaborative projects we could do together if it weren’t for state testing, time constraints, and all the other excuses you can imagine. I needed something that wasn’t an umbrella degree like education, but wasn’t so focused that it limited me to certain content. I found in the MAET program something that spoke to me – a chance to take all of my raw ideas about tech and learning, reflect upon them, and hopefully coax them into some focused philosophy while picking up skills along the way, though that philosophy part might be a reach. My education philosophy seems to change with every day I learn in virtual networks or even talk with a fellow teacher. One shared link on Twitter can get me thinking and wondering about everything all over again. Uncertainty – it’s a nice place to be sometimes.

I’ve started a blog (Mary gets her MAET…still working on that title) separate from my usual teaching blog (See Mary Teach), because I want to keep my course work separate from my usual ruminations in education. Also, some of the content of my MAET blog might be a little dry for some (I’m getting ready to write an example blog post about the differences between web pages and blog posts for my CEP810 course, for example). This is always a challenge for me – to decide how I am going to use one space over another and what tools I’m going to use to achieve the goals. I’m an early adopter of many online apps and tools and often find myself saying things like “wait a minute, I have 45 different ways to take notes…is that necessary?” And determining the answer to questions like that – to finding the right tech tool for the job – is something I hope to become better at through the course of this program so that I may model it for the students I have next year and in the future. And I’m just excited to be talking about teaching and learning in another space in such a complicated time.

I will be cross-posting content from See Mary Teach and vice versa from time to time and while my grad blog is separate, I encourage anyone interested in following it to do so. I plan to be transparent in my learning and opinions of the courses and program as I move through them and I welcome your feedback and interaction.

Open-source lessons

I’ve heard and read of people lately lamenting our dependency on technology, complaining about how “social” networks seem to alientate us from real life social interaction, etc. While I hear these things, I try not to listen. No matter how over-stimulated I feel, no matter how out of control my RSS reader gets (sometimes you juts have to hit “mark all as read” and move on), I’m still pretty stoked about living in this time.

One of my favorite things about the web and connectedness is the availability of tons of free software. Developers and programmers blow my mind. I have Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff marked as to-read because I am unabashedly being programmed. I don’t know much about how all of this stuff works – the stuff I sit down to use every day – but I would be lost without much of it. The authors of many of the free programs out there spend countless hours developing programs only to spend even more time answering questions in discussion threads, responding to tweets, making helpful screencasts, and addressing errors in the program with subsequent updates. They might request a donation here and there, but whether or not they get it they keep plugging on. I’ve started reading Seth Godin’s Linchpin on recommendation from my super-smart friend Amber Karnes. I realize that these software developers found problems or needs, figured out how to address them with a program, and set about spreading the answer freely. They weren’t waiting for someone to “pick them,” as Godin calls it. They went for it and boy am I thankful.

I’d just like to give a shout out to some of the rad software I’ve been using lately. All of this is available for free. A few of these have freemium options or additional things you can add on for a fee, but at their most basic they’re still great:

1. Calibre. I’d be lost without this program. With the many ebook devices, file formats, and files available, one can easily get overwhelmed. If someone wants to share a file from their e-reader device with you, but you only have a Kindle, you need to convert the ebook to a different format. How do I do that? Enter Calibre. With minimal input from you, the program will take a file and convert it to the format needed for your device. You can also download metadata like tags, book covers, author info, and organize your library. Another awesome feature is the news gathering option. Calibre will grab news from various sources and create a readable file from that online content you can send to your device. Oh, and did I mention it will grab all your Instapaper reads and send them to your device? Every time I turn around this program gets more awesome.

2. Anki. I had a little trouble figuring this one out, but thanks to active discussion boards with responses from the program’s developer and screencasts, I’m set. Anki is a spaced repetition system, which most people consider to be the best system for reviewing information in a flashcard setting. I won’t get into whether flashcards are helpful for truly learning info (there is a lot of debate about the “best” languge learning methods), but it’s something I’m experimenting with in my learning of the Dutch language. To oversimplify an SRS system, it uses algorithms to remember what cards you answered easily versus the ones you need help with and puts the ones that need review closer to the front of the deck. There’s an Anki desktop app, an online version (both free), and a iPhone app ($25) that will seamlessly sync cards and statistics. The program also supports non-Arabic characters and is popular among people learning Japanese. This is a reminder to myself that I need to be studying my Dutch more…

3. NeoOffice. Who needs Microsoft Office? Seriously. This program allows you to save documents, spreadsheets, presentations, in tons of different formats, including super old MS Office file formats. While I tend to use Google Docs for everything, and I recently found my Office for Mac disk, I still need something to open files that might be sent to me in formats my programs don’t currently support. Not totally necessary, but it’s nice to have if you want all the bells and whistles offered by the ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite of programs. NeoOffice is part of the OpenOffice.org project.

4. OmmWriter. This is a distraction-free writing zone program. Once you open it you’re given a clear space to write without pop-up notices or anything else happening on your desktop. Omm has an upgrade for which you can pay, but the basic is enough for me. I’ve gone a little analog with a traditional writer’s notebook for brainstorming ideas, but when I need a clear space to write a blog post or free-write and want to type, Omm is my go-to.

5. Evernote. Yeah, this is another one where you can pay for extra storage space and features, but I’m still below that threshold (most of my notes are text) and find its basic to be enough for my needs. Right now I’m using my new favorite screenshot Chrome extension to grab articles I’ve written online and save them to Evernote. My hope is to create an online portfolio outside of links, which can often go dead.

There are risks with using free, start-up, and open-source programs (the biggest being programmers can just stop updating them or companies can fold without notice leaving users floundering), but those risks are outweighed by the great things you can do with them. And there are lessons to be learned when companies fold – things we can teach students, such as “Don’t put all your digital content in one basket (program)” and the one I need to remind myself of often, “Backup your data early, often, and in multiple places.” We teach kids about time management and organizing their notebooks – here are those same lessons, digitized. Photo by vancouverfilmschool.

So don’t just sit back and accept the suite of products that comes standard on your computer (or on your school computer). There are people out there creating programs that can put the best productivity suites to shame. Schools should be considering these programs first before heading to vendors and spending astronomical fees on licenses.

While the preceding tools aren’t all deserving of the term open-source, I wanted to mention it since I believe the open-source movement to be one of the most amazing parts of the internet. People are creating software and content and telling others to “go, use it, copy it, do with it what you want and maybe in the end it will be even better.” There’s a community out there and a lot of learning and creating going on without any payback (Wikipedia comes to mind). This intrinsically-motivated community is happy to share with others and often asks for nothing more than a bit of hyperlinked credit. This community is an important thing to introduce to students and offers a lot of potential for educational institutions (hello, free software! goodbye licensing fees!). Isn’t this what we want from our students? To not even think about the grade or the points value or the damn rubric, but to create because it’s fun and can make a difference?

Second language learning in America

On a recent trip to the grocery store I shyly approached a young man (probably a teenage boy) quietly stocking the shelves. I stammered out my best “Pardon, spreekt u Engels?” to which he replied “a little bit.” I let out a sigh of relief even though I knew the answer before asking – everyone speaks at least “a little bit” of English. I’d been in The Netherlands for long enough at that point to recognize a Polish accent when he spoke. I needed help figuring out what to do with my produce since a sign covered up the scale where I normally weighed my fruit and obtained my price. While this young man’s English language skills weren’t perfect, he still understood my question and gave me the answer I needed.

I was impressed, as I often am when outside the U.S., by this man’s skill in being a Polish immigrant to The Netherlands speaking enough Dutch to get him a job at a store and also speaking enough English to help me. This man spoke three languages. Maybe not perfectly or academically, but he still spoke three languages. This wasn’t some university professor who had spent time in another country or a young person privelged enough to attend second language lessons at a young age. This was a stock boy in a grocery store. Graphic by woodleywonderworks.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve found myself shocked by the second and third language skills of people in countries other than my own. In France a garbage collector was able to give me directions in a nearly perfect English accent. In my Dutch class there are students with native languages that make learning Dutch much more difficult than it is for me (Thai, for example), yet their tongues form the words and when they can’t get their point across they switch almost effortlessly to English. It’s in these moments that I realize my stereotype of multilingualism as a hobby of the elite is completely unfounded.

These moments shame me and inspire me. I am fluent in only one language – English. I attended a few private (and very low budget) Christian schools and graduated from public school where I was required to study Spanish. I also studied Spanish at university, but I can do little more than understand vocabulary words and simple sentences. Conversing is out of the question. I know very few people in the U.S. who are truly bilingual or even fluent in another language. The few people I know in America who are bilingual are so because they were raised in homes where English was not the first language spoken – not because their schools pushed them toward fluency in another tongue.

Research has shown us, time and time again, that the time in our development most ripe for language learning is at a young age, yet very few schools begin foreign language study at the primary level. On a recent trip back to America, I had a chance to grab a drink with a friend I taught with last year and we both lamented our inability to speak a foreign language and the daunting prospect of attempting to achieve fluency as adults. We felt jipped by our educations – like the people making the decisions didn’t think we were important enough to cultivate into global citizens. Unfortunately, part of the problem with foreign language education in the American public school systems is time. Students often have to take five or six classes each year just to graduate, leaving little time for in-depth study of a second language. And many students can graduate without ever having studied a foreign language.

America has put so much pressure on English and math courses as “most important” in the curriculum. Many of my students struggled with communicating clearly in their native English tongue and they were approaching 18 years old, so one might ask why we should even bother getting those students learning another language on top of English. We should do it because there is no better way to understand your native language than through the lens of a foreign one. I have never been so cognizant of English grammar constructions than when I started studying Dutch. I’m an “English teacher,” yet I’m continually learning about my own language as I learn a second one. To understand how the Dutch construct a sentence one has to understand how it differs from how sentences are constructed in your own language.

The lackluster foreign language education in America is breeding unilingual teachers like myself. The teachers who are bilingual (or multilingual) see the marketability of that fact and may reach beyond the borders of America for more lucritive and exciting careers in international education or opt for private schools that will compensate them for the rarity of fluency in a second language. Or they may skip over the prospect of education as a career since pay scales are set in stone and allow little room to compensate new hires for unique skills.

Dutch students are required to study not just their native language and English in school, but French and German. We put limits on the potential of American students by not pushing them to study two or more languages. Being able to speak a second or third language instills confidence in students and opens up new worlds to them, not to mention it helps to mold them into more global-minded individuals by allowing them to delve into cultures other than their own. While I hate the rhetoric about America “losing” to other countries in certain fields and studies, I would ask the leaders that make that argument as a push for standardized testing how they expect the students that score highly on those bubble tests to help America “win” if they can’t communicate in languages other than English?

I feel like I was done a disservice in my education by seeing foreign language study portrayed as an elective and being told “but don’t worry – everyone speaks English.” That may be comforting to the occasional traveler, but if we want our students to be able to go anywhere and do anything, as we so often tell them they can, then we have to put a heavier pressure on administrators and elected officials to appreciate and fund foreign language education.

Now, who wants to help me with my Spanish?

Close of school business (and reflections)

I wouldn’t say the last year has been the ideal experience of a new teacher, but it has certainly shown me a diverse population of students, given me the chance to try different techniques, and taught me more than anything else to roll with the punches.

I started this 2009-2010 school year as a student teacher in Virginia Beach working with ninth graders in a Global Studies and Foreign Languages Academy program at Tallwood High School. They gave me the chance to cut my teeth with them on challenging world literature. We slogged through Tu Fu and Jorge Borges together and came out on the other side feeling pretty damn proud of ourselves. But like all things, my time with them came to an end in December along with my teaching certification program.

It was time for me to move on to something new, but what? It was the middle of the year and school systems were cutting positions not hiring. I decided to fall back on my freelance writing and editing work and hope for substituting gigs. Little did I know that another door was opening just as I was getting into a routine.

Along came the sixth graders at Ruffner Middle School’s Young Scholars program, a gifted education program in Norfolk. It was an amazing, long-term substitute opportunity and I snatched it up. I taught reading, writing, and early American history to 38 children that renewed my optimism and excitement about teaching even as they challenged my remaining threads of patience. They were so curious and opinionated and intelligent and they really had no idea of any of it. I went into the job thinking it would renew my feelings about the age group I wanted to teach, but instead they opened my mind and had me thinking “Sixth grade is pretty great. I wouldn’t mind doing this for a while.” I feared teaching history. I love history and enjoy consuming it on my own, but I’d never considered myself a history teacher until this job. Now I have a history endorsement on that list of goals in the back of my mind along with those other lofty ones (master’s degree, publishing articles, etc.). I’d planed to teach the sixth graders as long as the school would have me, but Virginia Beach called again and wanted to interview me for a full-time, contract position teaching core 11th graders. I got the job and it was time to move on again.

One of my sixth graders warned me “You think we’re crazy, Ms. Worrell? You’re gonna miss us once you get with those 11th graders!” I laughed it off. I wanted to teach high school and this was my chance to work with yet another age group and learn more about my strengths and weaknesses. But in that first week my little sixth grader’s ominous warning echoed in my mind. I felt I’d been thrown into a lion’s den of hormonal teenagers ready to claw their way through me to get out of high school. Gone was the feeling of being a learner alongside them. They saw me as an adversary and I wasn’t sure how to reach them – or if I even could. It was a Herculean struggle, but I’m happy to report that I have come out on the other side learning more than I ever thought I would in a contract only three months long. The eleventh graders (the large majority of them boys) taught me so much about classroom management and patience that I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. I taught The Great Gatsby, a book I myself hated in eleventh grade, and learned to love it. Even more exciting – I watched students learn to love it. I didn’t have my own classroom, so I was forced to drag a cart around between rooms and classes, teaching me the value of obsessive organization. Along with my four blocks of eleventh grade, I also had a block of core ninth graders whom I taught The Odyssey and Romeo and Juliet – stories I knew but had never really given close scrutiny.

And more than anything, my experience with my first contract position gave me a taste of what I really want in an English department – co-workers that are great friends and colleagues depending on what the situation demands. The English department at Green Run High School is a motley crew of large-hearted, loving teachers that want nothing more than to see one another succeed. If there ever was tension among teachers in that department, I never noticed it. I felt I could approach any teacher with advice on lesson plans or for ideas on teaching a certain story or book. It’s a supportive and collaborative department and I’m sad I’m not going to be there next year. I have never laughed so much at work.

I’m starting another chapter in this whirlwind year, but I’m hoping to settle down with a teaching position where I can teach students from beginning to end, on my own. I’m moving to The Netherlands in July to pursue a career abroad and to expand my experiences in an international environment. I’m excited about teaching students from a completely different culture than my own and watching those same light bulbs go on in their minds. I’ve daydreamed about what it would be like to teach The Great Gatsby to a group of non-American teenagers and to make connections about the American Dream to their own dreams – are we that different?

So, I’m off again to search for a teaching job – this time in a country not my own. I’m hopeful and optimistic and just as inspired as when I started.

Coming up for air at NCTE 2009

So, I had this grand idea that I would post weekly during my student teaching experience, but it looks like time (and mental energy) has gotten away from me to say the least. I’m in the eleventh week of my 14-week internship and I can’t believe how fast it’s all gone by. I’m having trouble just finishing the work I have to do as a student teacher – mainly my Impact on Student Learning project and my digital portfolio.

But my arrival in Philadelphia for the annual National Council of Teachers of English conference has me reinvigorated to reflect on my teaching experience so far.

Everyone told me it would be the hardest but the most rewarding experience of my life and I really think that’s true. There are so many students I’m teaching that I know I’ll remember for the rest of my life – some because of their amazing and unexpected insights during class discussions, others for their quirky behaviors that challenge my patience.

These are just a few of the things I’ve learned through this internship that I don’t think could be transferred to the classroom, which makes me so thankful that I decided to go the traditional route for this license (which included student teaching) despite my non-traditional/career-switching situation:

1. Classroom management cannot be mastered in a semester.

I have wonderful students. Most of jump right into my class discussions without my having to plead with them. They teach me new things every day. But…they love to talk and engage one another with goofy faces and smiles from across the room. On the one hand, they are 14-years-old! What should I expect? On the other hand I want so desperately for them to listen to their classmates during discussions and engage in the material. How do I get these exciting discussions going while also maintaining some level of decorum? I hate to “shh” them because I feel like it stifles everything. I want the lively discussion and debate without having to rein them in. Cake and eating it too?

2. Creating effective assessment has been the hardest thing I’ve done all semester and, subsequently, bringing closure to units and creating effective review of the material has been the second hardest thing.

We read “The Nose” by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, “Borges and I” by Jorge Borges and “To Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos” as the first unit focusing on identity and duality. It was a wonderful and challenging way to start the course. Some students panicked when reading Borges with the way he leads you around until you’re a bit dizzy, forcing you to read sentences over and over to find his meaning, but once they understood the theme of the essay and his purposes in creating a maze of words I could tell they felt accomplished. They beat Borges’ essay into something they could digest and found it rewarding. The same was true for our studies of Ryunosuke and de Burgos. But then came time to assess and that’s when I started panicking. I didn’t know how to even start creating a test let alone a review for the material. I settled on small group discussions of higher-order thinking questions about the material in an effort to tie all three works together. The test itself included multiple choice questions and two essays. I know in my heart that the essay questions are the way to go, but I did have some regrets as I spent hours grading 110 tests (meaning, 220 essays). Once I finally finished grading everything, I took 20 minutes out of each block to go over the test, showing models of students that received full credit on the essays. The entire assessment process really took it all out of me, but the reward was seeing that most of my students had learned a great deal and could show me so with their essays.

3. It excites me to see students reading and writing on their own (I have quite a few aspiring authors in my classes), but it always pains me when I have to tell them to put their works away in class.

It’s my class and they should respect that by engaging in the lesson not reading independently while the rest of us work, but I’m always afraid I’m doing some sort of damage by forcing them to close the book or put down the pen. And I’m not talking “Twilight” or “Harry Potter” here, I’m talking heavyweight literature. This is not a joke – I had to tell one of my ninth graders to put away his copy of “Anna Karenina.” Another was deep into creating characters for his next play. The top of his paper read “Dramatis Personae.” Seriously.

4. I need to learn to roll with the punches.

I don’t know how many times I’ve griped about best-laid plans in these 11 weeks, but I need to stop and just start getting used to working around things. It’s part of the job, but it’s been one of the hardest things for me to grasp. And I don’t think contingency planning within my lesson plans would make much difference. It’s something you get better at over time, I think. My cooperating teacher is great at it.

Speaking of my cooperating teacher, I don’t think I could have been placed with a better person. She has very high standards for her students and runs a tight ship in the classroom, but also connects with them on emotional levels. When it comes to what’s best for students, I really think she combines the best of both worlds. She doesn’t coddle them or let things slide, but she’s also kind and understanding of where they are in life. Fourteen is a strange age and after nearly 20 years of teaching, she really understands who they are when they enter that classroom and how jarring high school is.

I’ve learned a lot from her in this short time, but the two things that stick out in my mind are classroom management and the value of in-depth discussion. She is a true believer, and research has supported this, in the idea that talking and discussing an issue or work of literature helps you learn. As an incentive, class participation is 10 percent of the students’ grade. At first running a class discussion really intimidated me, but my university supervisor says I’m improving my method of asking leading questions during discussions – of phrasing questions in such a way that it optimizes getting the answers I want.

I’m looking forward to hitting the ground running tomorrow at NCTE 2009. I attended last year’s convention when I was in the middle of education coursework, but now that I have some real teaching under my belt I feel like I’m going to get even more out of the sessions. And I feel more confident about joining a round table discussion session.

I’ll be posting daily, hopefully, about my experiences in Philadelphia at NCTE. Hope to see you there!

Teaching stress – not teaching it, dealing with it

I’m under plenty of stress with school and work. It’s my first time filing business taxes, so I’m busy gathering receipts and documents all so I can know how much to shell out to the government this quarter.

But I found this great article from SmartTeaching.org – thanks to a tweet by @msstewart – listing 101 ways to deal with teaching stress. Check it out!

101 Ways to Cope with Teaching Stress

A teacher’s health

I’ve been swamped with school work. It’s mid-semester and exams and projects often loom around this time, but I’ve been trying to make my health a priority. I’m already vegan, but when I’m cramming for classes and trying to meet writing deadlines, “vegan” doesn’t necessarily translate to “healthy.” You know, most salt and vinegar chips and soda pop are vegan.

However, working out has always fallen by the wayside when I get busy. I’ve been told by friends that you have to make fitness a priority – like eating, sleeping, etc. But that’s been a hard change for me to make since I feel like I could be getting work done when I’m at the gym. However, the past two weeks I’ve been following a regimen of hitting the gym at least three times a week. I’m hoping that doing so will give me more energy in the long run to complete the tasks I need to get done.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the health and wellness of teachers. I’ve known a lot of teachers to gain weight when they start teaching, because they spend so much time planning, eating when they can (and usually not healthful foods), and never having time for things like the gym. I have a friend whose mom, a special education teacher, hits the gym at 5 a.m. every morning before heading to her school by 6:45 a.m. My head spins just thinking about it.

I’m wondering how other teachers make time for their health and family while being in such a demanding career? I think of Erin Gruwell in the “Freedom Writers” movie, spending every hour involved in her teaching or fund raising for her class. So I guess this is more than just a question about fitting in time for working out, but for yourself in general. How do you do it?

I’ve been warned of teacher burnout – that most new teachers leave the profession after five years or less. I think figuring out a positive teaching / life balance will be important, but I’ve never been one to be good at balancing anything, especially when it comes to my time.

So, teachers, how do you do it? How do you make time for working out, eating healthfully, taking care of kids, having a life, etc.?

“But SOLs are over!”

Friday was the first day for some of the 8th grade students to have English class after completing their writing SOL on Tuesday and Wednesday. They were surprised to find a writing assignment on the agenda – a book review for a contest.

The first question out of the students: “Why are we writing? The writing SOL is over.”

I think this warrants a sigh.

*Sigh.*

The last two weeks I’ve been with these students, the writing SOL has been the focus of every class. What the students are learning (types of essays and their parts, writing introductions/conclusions, test strategies, etc.) is applicable beyond the SOL – we know that. How do we show students that the SOLs are very important, but that learning in general is the goal? I’m sure this is an old struggle for most public school teachers, but this was my first experience with the SOL.

I took a few SOLs in high school, but graduated before they became a prerequisite for graduation, so the pressure wasn’t nearly as great. I’m wondering how I will get the point across to my students that the SOL is important (not necessarily my opinion – just a fact), but that we need to strive toward improving our writing skills even beyond these major tests. That needs to be the overall goal – learning something new everyday and pushing ourselves to try more. It’s unfortunate the SOL, a minimum standards assessment, is often the goal.

In other, less depressing news, I taught almost an entire block on my own! We discussed the parts of a book review, what we might include in a review, favorite quotes that we might include, etc. The students are able to choose from two of the books they’ve read – “Gathering Blue” by Lois Lowry or “Night” by Elie Weisel. Then we ate popsicles!

Communicating with students

I’ve always had plans of how I want to communicate with my students outside of class, should the need arise. I know I want to utilize blogging in some way, e-mail of course, instant messaging and Twitter. Maybe not all of them at the same time, but I’ve thought about being available via instant messaging for homework help and sending notices and reminders out to students and parents on Twitter.

But after reading about a Wisconsin school board’s decision to ban communications between teachers and students on social networking sites and instant messaging services, it looks like not all schools are ready or willing to take on such a “risk.”

This is a bummer, because I think the reward far outweighs the risks involved. In a middle school class today I heard students discussing chats they had the night before with classmates and comments they left on friends’ pages. The students are already there – I don’t see the problem in teachers meeting them where they are to remind of a test prep session after school or of a homework due date. If teachers know their own boundaries, and I believe most of them do, things will be safe.

Thanks to Dean Shareski for getting me riled up with his insightful post.