You’d think I would learn

Todd Whitaker has this little bit that he talks about in person (and he’s done it both times I’ve seen him) where he talks about teachers who say things like, “I’ve told Billy a thousand times not to do that.” His remark: “Now there’s a slow learner.” (After a few seconds, you start to realize that Whitaker’s not talking about Billy…)

Sometimes I feel like that teacher.

 

An instructional prediction

Post now updated with post-data – see bottom of entry.

I have often been disappointed at the reaction that some students have had to activities I’ve prepared, especially the ones I’ve been excited about. I once tried to do an activity with eighth graders that was essentially an improvisational exercise utilizing an understanding of the four types of sentences – declarative, exclamatory, interrogative, imperative – based on an improv bit that was done on the late great improv show Whose Line Is It, Anyway? where the participants are given a certain type of sentence and can only use that type of sentence to carry on a dialogue. (The Whose Line? bit focused on questions, and they also did something similar with song titles.) I thought it would be fun and it would engage current knowledge – well, it bombed, badly. Part of it was a lack of understanding of what they needed to do, and part of it (I think) was a lack of motivation to be creative.

So when I started planning an activity today, I decided to temper my enthusiasm with a little cynicism about how well it will be received.

 

A great opportunity for learning

And it’s not from me!

Actually, I’m really excited about this opportunity. I had the idea several weeks ago to try and find guest speakers from various cultures that would align with units of literature that our senior English course is studying. The first one was virtually a no-brainer for me: looking at the literature of Latin America would provide a wealth of opportunities to find speakers with experience in these countries so that my students could have a first-hand account of these places.

So I sent an E-mail asking for potential speakers to the chair of the modern languages department of my alma mater, and (somewhat to my surprise) I received an E-mail back saying that the information had been forwarded on to someone who was interested, even naming the individual and their majors. I was ecstatic, to say the least.

Well, my excitement faded as the days passed and I had no E-mails from this individual. I contemplated sending them an E-mail but thought better of it. If they want to come, they’ll contact me, right?

 

A high note in the middle of the week

In the midst of these first-year struggles (the sort of growing pains that I think most teachers have to deal with), I have learned to look wherever I can for little celebrations. It’s sometimes difficult, but I can find them. Today’s was especially great for me.

 

Being proven wrong – again

This is not a good week for me when it comes to making assumptions.

First, there was my encounter with bigotry and dealing with that, and then, when I thought I had a great solution, there was this: Several of my students decided to be wiseacres (putting it nicely) and asked me what temperature I was today. It was clear that my strategy hadn’t worked except in that one case (and even then it was probably mostly because of how I responded to them, not because of the technique itself) and that it wouldn’t work again.

I guess that proves that “diamonds” are not, in fact, forever.

 

A diamond from pressure

I can’t say I’m always great under pressure, but every so often, I do something in the moment when I am feeling the stress and weight of a difficult class, and it works beautifully. When it does, I just want to share.

 

Something that worked, part 2

It’s taken me over eight months to add a second part to this, but I finally have something.

Today was a weird day; our chapter of FFA took a great deal of students to a local ag event (not surprising for a rural school), and so I knew in advance that I would be losing a lot of students. So, like all teachers do, I adjusted.

The only problem was that my classes of juniors didn’t lose nearly the proportion of students that the other classes did, so I was left trying to do something without pushing on with new material (because I hadn’t planned to). What’s a teacher to do with a spare day, no material, and the desire to keep an already rambunctious group of students from turning riotous?

A game, of course.

I can’t take credit at all for what I did; in his methods text, Teaching English by Design: How to Create and Carry Out Instructional Units,  Peter Smagorinsky includes a page with a variety of unit ideas and other resources, including a list of vocabulary games. Having looked through them in preparation for today, I set my sights on Pyramid. (Check out the link if you’re curious about the game’s details.)

I’m a big believer in using word roots in order to help students associate meaning with words, which can also help somewhat when students identify these roots in new words and thereby make an educated guess at the word’s meaning in a given context. Pyramid does that pretty nicely, and the students responded well to it. I don’t think it seemed too much like an “educational game,” and there were moments when we were laughing so hard because of how the students were trying to convey the meaning of a word. Some students did better than others, and we ran out of time for it in the larger section, but it was clear from how involved students got that we’ll be doing it again. Who knows? Maybe I can use it as leverage (like my previous idea). You never know.

At any rate, I’m just glad that something worked. Every day is another step closer, and that’s a good sign.

Teaching Engl

 

Can I take back best practices?

In the time since I’ve been hired and teaching in this position, I’ve been able to cobble together a picture of the teacher my students had last year. Originally, I thought that the situation wasn’t pretty, and while I think that is still true, I have softened a little on the last teacher. Ultimately, her problem was really one that boiled down to classroom management; she let classes get too far, based perhaps somewhat on the fact that she hadn’t been as responsible for following through with punishments at her previous teaching positions. As another teacher told me, she wasn’t prepared to deal with “rowdy rural kids.” (And a lot of them are just that.)

And while I think that this teacher’s classroom practices were more than a little strange (her handout on procedures and discipline was bizarre in a lot of ways) and that she may not have been the most prepared teacher with it came to planning (that’s my principal’s opinion), I also have begun to understand that she was not incompetent in terms of pedagogical knowledge. (It goes to show that knowing good pedagogical theory doesn’t do a bit of good if you don’t know how to make the classroom run smoothly enough for it to work in practice.) When I taught my novels students about T-charts, many told me that they had used T-charts with the last teacher but still did not understand them well. I found a folder marked “SQ3R” when cleaning out the classroom, which suggests that she attempted to improve reading skills using this literacy technique.

The most disconcerting of these realizations came during class with one of my rowdier junior sections (one with a high distribution of male students), when they were telling me about all the things they did to the last teacher. (I really feel sorry for her – although some of it was genuinely funny.) And in the middle of talking about stealing signs from the room and hiding another student in the podium, one student says, “Oh, don’t forget about lit circles!” which was met with thunderous laughter from the other (male) students around.

Sigh. Are lit circles ruined for these students (and me) because the last teacher didn’t know how to use them well and/or couldn’t control the situation well enough for them to be effective?

I don’t know. I do know that I’m not going to give up without a fight, understanding that the only students who are likely to make this difficult are my juniors. The sophomores never had the previous teacher, and the seniors are mature enough for it not to be a problem. Maybe this will only be a problem for one class, and I will do what some teachers have to do instinctively for some groups and alter instruction to avoid doing activities that will be problematic (like using small groups, for one example).

I’ll give it a go and see what turns out. That seems to be what I do best anymore.

 

Model teaching

Okay, that title is meant to be a little obfuscatory: I’m not really talking about model teaching in the idiomatic sense of ideal teaching (or best practices).

I agree with and try to practice the idea that students often need a model to follow before they go off on their own doing something. It has been painfully obvious to me that the autoethnography assignment that I gave to my seniors is definitely one of those things, since these students are new to the term and have probably never read an autoethnography (or if they have, they probably didn’t know that it was called autoethnography).

The problem: there aren’t really any models of autoethnography out there that are readily available. Certainly, I don’t have any writing resources for this assignment, having cobbled together an assignment from information available online from Susan Bennett (which was actually provided to me last fall by a professor at my alma mater who has, unfortunately, not returned my E-mail asking for assistance in finding a model).

So what’s a teacher to do when there is no readily available model? You make one.

 

How to do inspiring things with an uninspiring curriculum

Join me for this innovative and highly educational webinar at…okay, perhaps not. Probably, if I could fully demonstrate how to do inspiring things with an uninspiring curriculum, I wouldn’t be blogging about it here. (Then again, maybe there’s a philanthropist in me somewhere – after all, I’m not in teaching for the money…)

I think most teachers, at least in the early rosy-eyed days of their careers, want to inspire students. (Some teachers may have lower expectations about how many students will realistically be inspired: the student who is inspired by integrals or conic sections might be rarer than the student who is inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson or the fiction of Kate Chopin.) Yes, education is our primary goal, and of course we want students to develop greater academic prowess, yadda yadda, but I think there’s a deep part of us – the student part – that remembers (if it has happened to us, and hopefully it has) being inspired by teachers to love literature, language, history, the human body, nature, chemical reactions, etc., and that “inner student,” until it is stifled by the outer cynic, sits on our shoulder whispering, Hey, you make these kids feel the awe of what you do. You gotta make them understand why you love what you do. Be that teacher.

And we all start out wanting to be that teacher. We know what good teaching is from having had good teachers, and (as an education professor of mine uncontroversially pointed out) no one goes into teaching wanting to emulate the awful teachers they had.

Okay, that’s good – make the students understand why you love what you do. But what if you aren’t inspired by what you’re going to teach?

I found out last night that I was having trouble finding my own Muse for a course as I was planning the first week of classes. (I find that poetry writing and lesson planning actually aren’t all that different – you have to have a grand vision, direction, and some creative drive in addition to the structure and execution of the thing. At least, you do if you want to be inspiring…) With all of my classes, I started off saying, “Where is this course going in the long run, and what would be the best way to get us started thinking about it?” For my senior world lit, the answer was culture; we will be doing an autoethnography project in the first few weeks, and there is a lot of analysis of our own cultures to get us thinking about how culture and literature intertwine. For my sophomores, the idea was to invoke universal themes, facilitated by my (somewhat) inspired idea to have students discover the sort of themes that emerge through a more approachable medium for them: songs. (Think about themes that transcend musical genre: Do we only hear about unrequited love in country songs?) Even for my juniors (perhaps the most difficult of the three), the idea of challenging notions of what makes literature “American” provides a jumping ground into Native American creation stories.

And then I got to my novels course and thought, Wait, what direction do we have? We’re reading a bunch of mostly unrelated canonical novels…

And my inner student whispers, Hey, just because it’s an elective doesn’t mean these kids don’t deserve to be inspired…

And I wonder how I will find my Muse in material whose only substantial connecting thread is the length of the works.

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Like so many things in teaching, I don’t think there is an easy answer to my proposed idea. It’s hard enough to inspire even a majority of students with the most inspiring material – some students just aren’t easily impressed – but doing it with a lackluster curriculum presents an additional handicap. Maybe there’s a reason why the wizened cynic starts shouting down the inner student; maybe it’s easier that way.

All I know is that there’s an insistent voice still urging me on, and the only thing I know how to do is to listen – and think.