Help me, Chinua Achebe!

If you want a quick three-word description of what my life feels like lately, look at the title and you might get what I’m saying. (The Easter egg might also help, if you see it.)

Most of this feeling is unrelated to teaching (and is generally stuff that I wouldn’t want to spill on an unsuspecting and largely indifferent reading audience), but the sudden realization I had yesterday that there are only three weeks of school left before Christmas break most certainly is related. Ooh boy.

 

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:

 

Post-observation notes

Okay, so I had my observation earlier today, and I was very pleased with how things went. My lesson flowed just how I wanted it to: brief mini-lesson on complete sentences (amazing how many of my sophomores didn’t know how to identify the verb in a sentence), followed by another mini-lesson on run-on sentences, with guided practice throughout. It was practically an ideal situation (well, except for the amount of unprompted student response, but I chalk that up to grammar). I happened to be talking to a student as the principal left the room, and she gave me a thumbs-up as she left. Great feeling, I must admit.

Now on the other hand, I wanted to sell my juniors to the highest bidder (and at this point, it wouldn’t probably take too much of an offer). My nice lesson on McCarthyism and the “red scare”? Drowned out to “Why can’t we have time to work on our projects?” and “We’ll just forget this by Tuesday” and other various examples of whinery.* Nothing wears me out (not down) like complaining, especially when I know that I can’t give in and must push on with material.

Sigh. At least we only have one more day this week, and then a four-day weekend!

I have needed this so badly…

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*I think this is my own coinage, although in truth, it’s a pun off of the name of a bar that was nearby the university I attended.

 

A heavy load

This week is going to be an incredibly crazy week. Starting tonight, I have events through Tuesday night which will take a significant amount of my time, and I have lounge duty this week (meaning that I’m responsible for bringing snacks for coworkers and keeping the lounge clean all week). On Thursday, my fall evaluation period begins, and so I have to work out some time to 1) have a pre-evaluation chat (I think that’s what she wants) and 2) set up an observation time (prediction: it will not be during my junior classes). And there are further school events that will complicate matters further near the end of the week, which is very inopportune given that for at least one class I am already struggling to fit everything in that I want to do before the end of the quarter (which is three weeks away). I’m trying to plan as best I can to make this week work without too many issues, but, like so many things with teaching, it’s a juggling act.

It’s possible that I may not be able to blog very much at all consequently, so don’t be surprised if I’m absent for a few days. (Not that anyone will likely be holding their breath, so to speak…) We’ll have to see how things go.

 

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

 

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.

 

Improvements and some ideas

I must have taken some of what I said before to heart: today was a great improvement.

I don’t know that I can rope anything down for sure, but I think that what I did with my students was more interesting in general. I know that my sophomores seemed to work much better with the work we did, and we easily filled the time. My juniors are still so rambunctious, and I need to come down harder on them, I think. There’s still so many disruptions that make it difficult to keep everything together, and I haven’t been as strict as I know I need to be about that. I’ve already predicted that my first detentions will come in a junior class, and I think I might just have to make it happen so that the precedent is set and the kid gloves thrown off.

[I have to make a side note here: the juniors have been incredibly open about some of the things they did to the last teacher who didn't provide enough structure, including but not limited to stealing signs from the classroom and - almost unbelievably, to me - hiding a student inside the podium/lectern that's still in the classroom. Even as disruptive and even undisciplined they can be for me now, I don't have anything like that yet. I guess when I start to see pranks being played, that's a sign that things need to change. Although, I did lose my doorstop today...]

In addition to coming down harder on classroom management, I’ve been thinking about ideas to provide some sort of incentive. Because the entire junior classes seem to be pretty unfocused when I have them, I’ve considered making a bargain for better focus and fewer diversions by using one of the tools in my teacher’s tool chest of experience: music. As I discovered last semester at the end of student teaching (and a little earlier for my juniors there), my students responded very well to bringing in a guitar and showing off my abilities as a musician, something that I think teenagers respect.

So here’s my idea – and feel free to give me feedback on this if you think I’m crazy and/or a genius: rather than making a deal outright exchanging the behaviors that I profess to be expecting for a reward (something that hasn’t worked well for me in the past), I would propose that in addition to avoiding the less pleasant aspects of disciplinary measures (i.e. consequences), students could earn the opportunity to nominate and vote on a song that I would then learn (with all of the selection happening well in advance) and play for the students. (Guidelines would be given on the nature of the song, of course.) My prediction is that this could get really silly, like voting for a rap or hip-hop song or some other song that would be somewhat embarrassing to hear me sing (my initial thought was Oops, I Did It Again by Britney Spears for such a song). I would also probably make this the result of a long streak, like setting a non-trivial number of days without any major diversions that are far too tangential.

Now, I might just be setting myself up for an inevitable denial of that incentive; I know that these students in particular tend toward being unfocused and even a little boisterous. (I think that certain classes are just this way, for some inexplicable reason. I’ve noticed it at other schools – my seniors during student teaching were that way in quite a few respects.) But I think that it might be something to help motivate students toward establishing habits that hopefully will make the class easier to deal with. It adds a social element as well, where students who actually think that this incentive is a worthwhile goal will put pressure on the other students who might not be as interested.

Nevertheless, I think it’s something I might consider. I even worked out an arrangement with the music teacher to see about borrowing the electric piano he uses for chorus in case it works out better. (The arrangement entails me doing accompaniment for the chorus for concerts, which I probably would do without getting anything. Conversely, I bet the music teacher would let me use the electric piano even if I weren’t accompanying the chorus because I’d only need it during hours that no one uses it. Still, it works as a nice little reciprocal agreement.)

Now, I just need to make sure that these improvements turn into a pattern, not allowing one good day to make me complacent about the amount of work I need to do. That won’t stop me from being pleased with the progress, of course, but hopefully it will keep my feet firmly grounded so that I can do the real work that I need to do, for my sake and my students’.

 

Debriefing: 5 days in

This past week has been crazy for me, but I can say that I’ve completed 5 of 180 days for this school year. I don’t know if I have any more statements of knowledge to make – actually, no, that’s a lie; I do know, but they are largely inconsequential compared to the ones I’ve already made. My juniors are going to be my difficult classes, my seniors and novel elective the easiest, with the sophomores falling somewhere in between. The juniors are made difficult by a few choice students who are so far finding lots of ways to turn productive discussions into useless diversions, and I’m struggling to keep them on task. I will have to pull my “you have a lot of work to do to prepare for the PSAE/ACT” card more for them, although I know that at least one student won’t care.

So far, I’ve passed out syllabi and texts, discussed a few major projects, given a pre-assessment in all but one class (which I have not yet been able to look at in depth), and had some relatively minor discussions about issues that will get each class thinking about the material at hand. I’ve lost a student, had some switching happening, and got a little bit exasperated with a few others.

I wish I could fairly assess how I’m doing, but I think it’s too soon. I don’t feel like I’m failing yet, which is a good sign, and everything went according to plan for the most part this week. I still have a lot of planning to do for this week, and I’m slightly at a loss for what to do with my autoethnography assignment which I will be teaching to the seniors this week.

I also wish I had something more to say that would seem relevant to other people and not just like I’m blathering on about what’s happening to me as a first-year teacher.

Okay, I will say this: I love the people I work with. Our principal is great for a number of reasons, not the least of which is her unequivocable support for her teachers and her personable nature with students (which of course providing very firm boundaries). And the teachers I work with are equally supportive and just downright fun people – I’ve spent a fair amount of time getting to talk with them over lunches, in the hallways after school, and in other contexts as well. I knew the atmosphere at this tiny little school felt right to me, and I know it is.

It really makes me want to succeed even more – because then I can stay.

I’ll try to remember that as I finish preparing for the week ahead. There are students to teach and a great job to keep!