A snow day review

Since today was officially declared a snow day about 10 minutes ago for me, and I’m already up, here’s a rant for you on movies and books. (WARNING: SPOILER ALERT)

 

Keeping up (or not)

This is take #2, due to a stupid browser and WP failing to auto-save properly.

My sincerest apologies to faithful readers – or perhaps in this case, wait-ers – for the absence; things have gotten a little more complicated this semester, and that’s the best excuse I can offer for my weeks-long blog silence.

One such complication – in a good way – is my own doing: getting our school involved in the national Poetry Out Loud poetry recitation competition, which I was fortunate to experience when student teaching last spring. I’m taking six students in total this week to our regional competition, three who were involved in the school contest and three other students who I’m hoping will be inspired by seeing the contest play out in person. I’m excited about going, in part because I’ll get to see my former co-op, who I have certainly missed, and perhaps (I hope) some of my former students.

This experience has allowed me to learn some important lessons about setting up extracurriculars that I will certainly remember for the next time (and certainly for POL next year, especially the importance of starting earlier). I just hope that the experience is useful for the students, that they will see the point in it. (I keep thinking of Marianne Moore’s great poem on the subject.)

Maybe eventually I’ll get back into a routine of writing; I would greatly enjoy that. For now, I’ll keep trying to get caught up and simply – to use an old cliché – keep on keeping on.

 

I have to teach what?

I can’t say that I’ve had a whole bunch of surprises as a first-year teacher, at least not other than what might be expected in the first year on your own in the classroom. I’ve been fortunate in that I experienced some interesting dynamics during my student teaching that prepared me somewhat for what would come this year.

But I can say honestly that I was surprised to find that there is something vital – and clearly outside the curriculum – that I need to teach some of my students.

 

Might I have done it now?

It’s been a while since I last wrote here, faithful readers (I know some of you are looking around, even if you’re new to the blog). Much has happened since school started up again – so much, in fact, that I’ve been buried in other work.

But I’m ignoring all of those other things for the moment to focus on a small victory.

 

Here we go again

School resumes today for a half-day + teacher inservice. I’ll only see about half of my students today (our half-days alternate between the first and last four periods of the day), most of whom should be turning in book projects that I gave an extended deadline on (they were originally due back in December, and I had mercy). The rest will be turning their projects in when I see them tomorrow, which means a lot of grading this week to be ready to post grades by next week, since our semester ends this week.

I’m hopeful, though, that I can get somewhat of a fresh start. I intend on backing up and trying to do some things differently that I should have done at the beginning of the year. One such thing is to rethink my process for discipline, from giving students input into what should be expected of them to how I handle repeated behaviors (and now I’m thinking more in terms of disciplinary contracts). I am also going to try and be more organized, including with my class webpages that I set up at the beginning of the year (none of which are even close to being up-to-date).

I have goals, and that’s a good first step. Let’s hope the next several days show evidence of doing something to meet them.

Teachers, how do you approach a new semester or the second half of the year (after break)? Any ideas that have worked for you?

 

It’s about time I passed this on

Over a month ago, blog friend Clix stopped by to point out a great resource for English teachers. I said I would look into it, having heard about it a little, but I admit that I was remiss in doing my duty to pass on this resource to my own readers (some of whom are English professionals).

The resource is the English Companion Ning, which (if you’re not familiar with Nings) is a social network that is dedicated to questions of English pedagogy. There are a great deal of very capable English professionals on the site, and there are groups and forums devoted to virtually any broad genres or disciplines within English language arts where you can start discussions and find resources for teaching – from teaching writing to teaching texts to teaching research papers, as well as discussions on The Crucible and transcendentalism (you can bet I’ll be referring back there soon) and To Kill a Mockingbird and teaching writing to lower level and unmotivated students (I’ll be revisiting that one soon – I have plenty of both!) and even MLA research papers. There’s honestly too many discussions to link.

And it’s a huge network – over 10,000 members as of this posting – that has even won this year’s Edublog Award for Best Educational Use of a Social Network Service.

If you are an English educator and haven’t checked out this site, don’t wait a month like I did – do it now. I promise, you won’t regret it.

 

Soliciting suggestions for nonfiction materials

This is probably going to seem pretty last minute – it is – but I have a request for any of my readers with even a passing knowledge of nonfiction materials.

I’m planning a nonfiction unit for my seniors next semester on civil disobedience and nonviolent protest. I hope to build in some texts that they should have had last year as juniors but didn’t, such as Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (more commonly known as “Civil Disobedience”) and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (which I generally teach with Thoreau, anyway), but I need some suggestions for other texts. Critical texts are fine – it will be good practice for students to look through more scholarly works – as are other primary texts. I’m already thinking about Gandhi’s Non-Violent Resistance (although I have to find it and make copies of some sections) and a critical text called Civil Disobedience in Focus by Hugo A. Bedau (of which I will likely only use the introduction as a primer of sorts). This is not enough, however; the unit will last approximately 3-4 weeks, if I can sustain it, so that I can use these texts to teach research skills such as notetaking, paraphrasing, summarizing, citing sources, etc.

So, faithful readers, I need your help. I need any works that are either reasonably short or that can be excerpted (so as not to overwhelm my students at the beginning of their last semester of high school) that have to do at all with civil disobedience,  nonviolent resistance, or nonviolent protest. Of particular interest would be information about the Civil Rights Movement (including the Montgomery bus boycott), the satyagraha movements in India and South Africa, American protests over the Vietnam War, Chinese protests in Tiananmen Square, and even contemporary American protests over issues like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Republican National Convention protest in 2004. I’m also not limited by medium; I’ll take hypertexts as well as any links to print sources. If you’ve got a PDF version (especially for any journal articles – I’m very limited in that regard) that you can share (this is all fair use, remember), feel free to E-mail me – docereestdiscere AT SIGN gmail PERIOD com. I will be incredibly grateful for any help any of you can offer.

Thanks again, readers – looking forward to more great conversations in the Ten! (2010, that is.)

 

On student feedback

One of my friends on Facebook is a college professor at my alma mater who is in her second year of post-graduate teaching at the university; although I never had her for a class, she and I discussed doing some work together for a digital rhetoric/new media article she wanted to submit to an online journal because I had experience with PHP/MySQL coding (the collaboration never happened, sadly).

Her status was about having just taken a look at online evaluations, which the university just switched to this year, and being depressed at the negative feedback. Being a fairly new teacher as well, I know how it is to get negative feedback and how frustrating it can be, but I shared some advice with her about how I’ve learned to handle feedback in general, and I’d like to share that with you as well.

 

Almost done

Our last day of school before Christmas break has just started a few minutes ago, and I am feeling pretty good. As of this moment, I’ve graded all of the exams I’ve given – only two, unfortunately, although the non-exam equivalent in another class (a persuasive speech) has been graded in full as well – and I have this hour, which is my normal prep period, to do several things: get my room more organized, think about what I’ll teach when we come back from break in early January, and – of course – reflect.*

 

Okay, a less stupid thing I did today

You might even say it was a case in which I did actually learn my lesson.