Why we gotta do this: A book review

I finished the book I’ve been reading this week earlier today, Why Do We Gotta Do This, Mr. Nehring?: Notes from a Teacher’s Day in School by James Nehring, and I have to give it my highest recommendations for any junior high or high school teacher (although it will be more topical for the latter). It is a very compelling book, equal parts narrative and commentary but all contained within a narrative framework that is very approachable. Nehring does a great job of telling the story of education – not a history, but the way things are. I say “are” because I don’t think things have changed a whole lot in the 20 years since this book was written and published; in fact, if you replaced all instances of “Walkmen” with “iPods,” there would be virtually no dissonance with the reality of education in 2009.

There is much that can be said about Nehring’s commentary – perhaps the most important part of the book, although the narrative is entertaining and engaging – but I want to return to that dreaded question that I wrote about a few days ago*.

 

Dealing with the dreaded question

As noted recently, I’m currently reading James Nehring’s wonderful book Why Do We Gotta Do This Stuff, Mr. Nehring?: Notes from a Teacher’s Day in School. It’s a fascinating book, written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness style that focuses on one day but jumps back and forth between the (somewhat) hypothetical events of this single day and the very real issues that affect teachers, such as groupwork and leading discussions. I’m enjoying it immensely.

I wondered when looking at the title if Nehring would discuss that dreaded question – “Why do we have to do this?” – and I wasn’t disappointed:

 

TGFSW

That’s “Thank God For Short Weeks.”

Today is the last day of instruction, and only the first half of the day meets for classes (so no juniors – hoorah!). It couldn’t come soon enough.

The last few days since I last posted anything have been extremely trying. Notable moments (good and bad):

• Tuesday: Celebrated the National Day on Writing in a few classes by doing writing of some kind, and I taught a mini-lesson on six-word memoirs; several of the students really got into it, giving me such gems as “Promises are made by truthful liars.” Also, sophomore hits me in the head with Dan Brown’s latest novel (I wish the student had better taste in smaller books). Oh, and I had to correct my seniors on the true etymology of the F-word (it’s from a common Indo-European root with analogues in several Germanic/Scandinavian languages; it has nothing to do with acronyms like “Fornication Under Consent of  the King”), which is, um, not something I had ever really expected to come up…
• Wednesday: Discussed evaluation with principal, which by and large was good; asked for some feedback on how I could improve and talked that out a little. A sophomore class really pushed me over the edge, and I gave another detention to one student in particular who has repeatedly pushed me too far.

I need the break, and I wish I were getting one: tonight is my older brother’s wedding rehearsal (I’m in the wedding party, my first time in that experience), and tomorrow is a few parent-teacher conferences in the morning (that might give me some new material to write about) and the wedding in the late afternoon. I am going to be wiped out, most definitely.

Wish me luck.

 

Fun as behavior modification

This Youtube video was posted by a friend on facebook, and it got me thinking…

About what? you might ask. Well, I’m glad you did!

One of the most remarkable things that this experiment suggests is that fun can be a viable method of behavior modification. If you want people to start using stairs (which is beneficial to them in terms of health, but don’t ask people to listen to reason on something like that), then find a fun way to entice people into using them: make the stairs a friggin’ piano.

I see a very logical extension of this “fun theory” into the classroom – if you want students to modify their behavior so that learning can occur, make the classroom fun. Throw out the stuffiness and stifling atmosphere and encourage one that pushes students to get up, to take risks, to let comfort go and reach for the unknown.

I don’t know an easy way to do this – and certainly I would be open to suggestions – but I think it can be achieved. It is, if nothing else, food for thought.

 

Challenges and reassurances

We’re now eight weeks out, with the quarter approaching imminently (it ends on this coming Friday). I’m glad that the quarter’s almost done, although I feel like I have so much to get taken care of in the meantime.

Looking back on just this week, it feels like so much has happened, so much that I want to talk about (and some of which I already have). So here it goes, I suppose (sorry about the unintentional rhyme):

 

The (dreaded?) first evaluation

Today is my first official observation and evaluation by my principal. I would be more worried except that 1) I like my principal and am not generally intimidated by her because I am fairly confident that she won’t just slam me but instead will provide constructive comments and 2) the class she’ll be observing is one of my better sophomore classes. (I pretty much abandoned any hope of her observing the juniors now, although my plans worked out such that today’s lesson for them should be pretty good – we’re covering McCarthyism in preparation for reading The Crucible next week, and I have some transparencies of Herblock political cartoons to help connect our previous discussion of the Salem witch trials on Monday.)

The only thing that leaves me a little worried is the fact that I opted to go for a language lesson today. We’ve been doing narrative essays in this course, and I found out pretty quickly that many students did not realize, for instance, that essays are generally not one long paragraph. I had to go through several of the initial drafts and say, “Hey, you need to break this up because your reader is not going to want to read one huge chunk of text.” I also have a lot of problems with sentence construction, particularly with run-ons, and that’s what I’m going to focus on today. It should be a relatively straightforward lesson, with little room for students to run away with the class (discussions about literature can get this way if I’m not careful), so I hope that will minimize problems.

On the bright side, only two more days left in this week, and then week eight is finished. Another short week next week, and the quarter is over and 25% of the year has passed. All in all, I think I’ve kept my head above water nicely, and I think at least some of my students have learned something – that’s a plus, right?

 

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.

 

How the first year is different from student teaching

Now that I’ve gone through about three weeks of my first year of teaching, I think that I have enough perspective to make some statements on how being a “real” teacher, solely responsible for what happens in the classroom, is different from the oversight and guidance of the student teaching experience. Or, at least I can make some distinctions about how my experiences in these two contexts have been different or similar. As always, your mileage may vary.

 

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