Randomly, I happened to see a link come in through my WordPress admin panel, and I followed a short trail to find out that I got some recognition for my blogging from Scholastic Instructor. Docere Est Discere was apparently selected as the “Best Student Teacher Blog” for the September issue. I am absolutely thrilled to get that kind of recognition, especially in words like this:

Why We Love It: From tips for up-and-coming student teachers to his own reflections on his process, Mr. B. reminds us how far we have come. Perfect for those days when we’re feeling just a bit jaded.

How could I not be motivated to write about my teaching experiences with that kind of praise?

Thanks, Scholastic!

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.

I should first note any confounding factors in making judgments about the differences between my student teaching assignment and my current position. The schools I have worked in are like night and day, or something close to it: a fairly large affluent suburban school (size: approx. 800 students) vs. a tiny rural school (size: approx. 130 high school students, not counting the 7th and 8th graders also housed in the same building). The English department at the school I taught in before had seven teachers, including my cooperating teacher; we have three including myself at my school, one of whom is the junior high language arts/literature teacher and the other the Spanish teacher who also teaches two sections of freshman English. My cooperating teacher for ST, additionally, was the honors/AP teacher, and we have neither tracked nor AP courses at our small school. (That may change next year since the incoming senior class, this  year’s juniors, will all be required to take English 12. My principal has already informed me that she may be looking for an English/history teacher to help out with this change.) As a result of having no tracked courses, I now have a fair number of students who have IEPs, which is a brand new thing for me. These are only a few of the differences I’ve had to adjust to in coming to this school.

On the other hand, it is remarkable how many things have remained the same. I can see some of the same kinds of students, the same (well, similar) personalities, and certainly the same sorts of behavior. Students still try to create diversions and tangents, they still have a tendency to panic or whine about having to read or write or do assignments in general, and they certainly still test their teachers.

For me, the last three weeks have been up and down, but perhaps no more so than what I experienced during student teaching. And the one thing I was most worried about – how the students would accept me – has been only a minimal problem. Most of the students have responded well to what I’ve been doing, and even the ones that are resistant seem to be doing better interacting with me than they did with the last teacher. (I know it’s probably not fair to compare myself to the last teacher, but it’s comforting at times.)

Like student teaching, the hardest times for me have been when two things converged: 1) I was not as prepared as I should have been or something I had prepared was not thought out well enough, and 2) the class was full of students ready to take advantage of even the smallest weakness in the lesson. And like ST, I have a class of students that tend toward disruptions, distractions, slight insubordination, and complaining. Those are the classes I’m still trying to work out, and like ST, I still haven’t gotten to the point where I have given a detention. It will be coming soon, I’m sure. (Student teachers: Don’t hesitate! Make an example, and don’t follow my example here.)

I also think I got lucky about organization in the fine model that my cooperating teacher had for grading, organizing papers, checking up on missing assignments, and also in being prepared. The gradebook was the most obvious thing to me: I immediately adopted the same method for entering grades in (to be then entered in the computer) that I had used during ST in keeping with my co-op’s practices. I started making myself lists (using space in my planning book, which has a great layout), which was a big thing that my co-op kept suggesting to me. (I actually E-mailed her at the end of the past week and told her as much myself. I credit her heavily with my success thus far.)

And being a new teacher has come with its own stuff. I have more responsibilities now for other things, like the curriculum committee that will start meeting shortly, and I am far more involved with the staff and administration than I ever was during my ST experience. I barely ever talked to the principal at that school, who was hardly an approachable guy, and my principal now is easy to talk to, caring, and ultimately very concerned about the success of both her teachers and her students.

I guess my ultimate conclusion is that moving between these two experiences wasn’t actually all that difficult for me, but I attribute a lot of that to the guidance I had as a student teacher and the guidance I have received from colleagues as a new, first-year teacher. When you learn a lot of lessons the hard way as a student teacher, they tend to stay with you as a new teacher (although there are always exceptions). Had I not had so much good hands-on preparation, where I had to deal with difficult students and less-than-ideal situations and got the chance to have the classroom feel like it was mine to a degree, I think I would be struggling so much more.

Then again, it’s only three weeks in. Maybe I’ll change my mind when some more new things come my way (like semester exams – yikes!). For now, though, I’m happy to report that this first year isn’t feeling entirely like a first year, and if it continues that way, I will be very pleased with my progress.

Looking at my blog stats (which I confess I’m a bit obsessive about), I notice that many of my posts with the most traffic have been ones about student teaching. So, in an attempt to write about things that I know something about (and to keep things going through this somewhat dry phase of planning-but-not-yet-teaching), I’m planning on writing a series of entries with advice for upcoming student teachers to consider before they start this invaluable (but stressful) experience.

First up is a topic I feel very strongly about: preparing materials for classroom use.

From what I’ve experienced and the situations that some of my fellow student teachers have described, student teaching placements are diverse and sometimes unpredictable. You might get placed with a veteran who has a very effective system worked out (which he/she will not want you to deviate from), or you might get placed with a relatively greener teacher who might be more laissez-faire, or combinations and variations of these. It’s mostly a crap shoot, unless you get involved in who you are placed with before student teaching (which isn’t unheard of – if you have a teacher that you would want to student teach with, go talk to your field placement coordinator!). Good, bad, or ugly, you’re stuck with it for the duration of your student teaching experience (hereafter STE).

I felt very fortunate in my placement. I had a seasoned teacher (within a few years of retirement) for my cooperating teacher, one who is very competent and well-respected by colleagues and students alike, and since I was student teacher #11, I benefited from the previous mentoring experiences of my co-op.

The first lesson I impart to future student teachers is one that I learned from my co-op, Mrs. B, as a matter of practice in my STE. When I came in, Mrs. B opened up her resources to me, especially as I began to prepare my major unit on 1984. But there was a caveat.

“You can look through this folder for ideas,” she told me, “but I’m not going to let you just use what I teach this novel with. You need to create your own resources.”

And this is rightly my first advice for student teachers: Create your own materials for teaching in the classroom.

In case it isn’t entirely obvious why you should do this, here are a few reasons:

1. Creating your own materials will force you to think about what you are trying to teach (and will consequently assess) rather than simply asking the questions and doing the activities that someone else has developed, someone who may be working under different assumptions of what students should be learning and who – of course – does not have a precise idea of what your students need to learn.
2. Sometimes, the things that are prepared with textbooks or even by other teachers are just wrong. Don’t learn this the hard way: If you do it yourself and are careful, you’ll have a much easier time. Besides, if when errors pop up, it looks so much more professional to say, “Okay, that was my mistake,” rather than, “Sorry, but don’t look at me – it was the textbook publisher’s fault.” (And if you use your co-op’s materials, that could potentially strain the working relationship.)
3. When you go into your own classroom, you may not be using exactly the same textbooks or other materials that you have in your STE. When you create your own materials, they can be taken with you. I already know that I will be re-using my excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail to accompany the textbook material on transcendentalism for my junior English course, and the activity should transfer nicely because I didn’t rely on pre-made activities and materials.

There are surely other reasons, but these should demonstrate how important this can be. Of course, teachers will more than likely share with you (and I shared resources I used to teach 1984 with a relatively new teacher during my STE), but relying on the assumption that there will always be materials ready to go for you to hand out and teach from is dangerous. Just don’t do it.

Bottom line: When it comes to classroom resources, perhaps the old cliché is true – If you want something done right, you might as well do it yourself.

It has been a good May Day.

Actually, April went out with a bang for me: I had my first interview at school #1, and it went well – well enough that the principal insinuated that I would probably get a callback for a second round of interviews. (!!) Excellent news, of course, and I’m hopeful.

Today, however, I took some time to return to the school I student taught at for a poetry slam that they held the last hour of the day, where students read their own poetry and even sang lyrics they had penned. I got blindsided a little, too: my former co-op asked me at the last minute if I’d play and sing something (a student had brought a guitar to sing one of her own songs), and despite not being entirely comfortable with it, I went ahead and performed a song I’d written a number of months ago. It was a very enjoyable visit, getting to see my former students and talk with my co-op, who I talked to about my current job hunt for a substantial amount of time.

When I left there, I found out that I’d had a call from another district while I was gone, and I immediately called the school back. They were, as I expected, calling about my interest in their position (which is for seventh grade). I said that I was, and we set up an initial interview for Monday morning.

This is good news to me: I sent off all of those applications, and all of them had application deadlines of today except for this school that called, and their deadline was yesterday. So maybe I’ll get some more calls on Monday after the schools have taken account of their applications. I’m much more hopeful now that I’m seeing something to show for those applications, and I hope it continues so that I have a good chance to find a job that suits me and that I’ll be happy with and successful in.

Student teaching, that is. (I thought the title would be appropriate given the day.)

Yesterday was my final day at my school, a half-day before the beginning of Easter break. All of my classes had parties scheduled, and it was a very enjoyable day. Some highlights:

• My eighth graders took an entire length of whiteboard (which is actually two whiteboards connected) to write up things about how they were going to miss me. Favorite part: “You turned out to be the best!” (If I needed any further demonstration of the change that occurred with this class, there it is.)
• I wore a sweater vest yesterday because of a long-running joke with my eighth graders that predates my appearance in the classroom, and while several students commented on it, one student in particular yelled, “SWEATER VEST!” as soon as he entered the classroom.
• My HS cooperating teacher had been planning some things secretly – I knew this because  she had me leave the room for about 5-10 minutes in every one of our classes for two days this week – and it turned out to be a couple of really nice things:
  • A long-sleeved school shirt that students had signed (and some students signed it during our party because they hadn’t been able to during class), which I actually wore yesterday because I was so proud of it; and
  • A binder of “student teaching memories” that included an 8″ x 10″ photo of each class (except for one class that had run out of time during class; we did get a class photo that my co-op said she’d send me) and letters that students had written to me, many of which were incredibly thoughtful.
• I had taken my guitar to school because I had promised my eighth graders that I would bring it in and play for them. Unfortunately, my co-op was somehow oblivious to this fact and kept the class going with a “pop quiz” (meant to benefit students who hadn’t skipped out on the half-day) and YouTube videos of narcoleptic animals. (I was a little bit irritated about this…but I’ll save my comments for the moment.) What happened rather unexpectedly, though, is that a student in my 2nd hour class brought in a guitar of their own, and it sort of got shoved at me to play. So I did – I played “Everything You Want” by Vertical Horizon (for the sake of having a song that some students might actually know), and I got a great response from it, so much so that I played for all of my high school classes. (I gave one class options, and they chose “Yellow” by Coldplay, which I had learned the night before for my eighth graders. After fumbling through it, I decided not to give any more options.)

  What amazed me about this was the way that many of my students responded; in particular, the primary comment I received from students in my problem class (5th hour) was, “Why didn’t you do that on the first day?” And while I have reservations about doing that sort of the thing on the very first day, the comment made me think – Why didn’t I do something like that earlier? What it so significantly accomplished was to help students to see a more 3-dimensional view of me as a person – not merely a teacher, a lover of the English language and literature, but as a person with other interests and talents. If I had done this earlier, I think that maybe I could have gotten some more students on board with me and saved myself some problems. Whatever it’s worth, I will highly consider this sort of thing as I think about my first semester as a “real” teacher.

Ultimately, to say that I have learned a great deal from my students would be a gross understatement. Many of these things are about how I ought to set up my future classroom, and they have been invaluable in that regard alone. Some of it is how I should interact with my students, and that is even more valuable. Some of it has been to make me more aware of what students need and how I can best meet those needs in order to make learning happen. I can’t put a price on any of this information, and I can’t imagine having acquired it any other way – nor would I want to! The journey has been exhilirating, exhausting at times, and extremely enlightening.

Both arrangements, junior high and high school, have been very beneficial for me, but I feel compelled to point out a key difference between the two: in the junior high situation, almost all of the things I learned were strictly from my students. The reason for this is a very, very laissez-faire approach that the co-op for my eighth grade class takes with practically everything, and it applied as well to me. The amount of time I had to talk with him and do any sort of substantive planning was virtually nil; he would leave the only other hour I had available to talk with him to get ready for practices (he’s a coach), and there was no time either after the class or before school to debrief or to talk about ways to help improve things. When I failed at something that I had high hopes for, his response was, “Yeah, sometimes they shoot down even the activities that you plan and think will be great.” He did mentor me on one minor matter that came up, but otherwise, he didn’t really get involved.

That was a 180° difference from my main classroom, where my primary co-op was far more nurturing (she’s a grandmother with grown children older than I am), supportive, and sometimes even firm with me. Like my other co-op, her way of dealing with me as a student teacher was virtually identical to the way she dealt with her classroom – very much interventionist and assertive. She took a very active role – in fact, almost too active at times, in my opinion – in guiding me through the whole experience, and I am incredibly grateful for all that she taught me and in some cases made me learn. One thing she did that was of great help was to give a little bit of help with materials that could be used but largely to make her own collection of materials off-limits to me; while this may not seem overly helpful, it forced me to come up with some of my own materials, and I actually enjoyed being able to put together materials that were directed to exactly what I wanted to do.

She also modeled a very assertive discipline approach for me; in a former life (okay, just before the birth of her youngest son), she was an assistant principal, and she really knows how to handle discipline and was able to give me quite a few tips in that area, which is probably still my weakest link, so to speak. The other areas where she gave me a substantial amount of guidance was in design and planning, both on a more long-range basis and in the short-term, dealing with organization (“Make lists!” she said to me). In turn, I was able to help her somewhat with technology, and I am glad that I will have left her with hopefully a little more knowledge and ability.

So now it’s over. I’m sure I’ll keep thinking back to what happened, given that this has been such a vital part of my life for the past 3 months, but there are other things ahead. One thing I will continue to do is to keep reading the literature on education and specifically English education (I have the latest issue of English Journal sitting around here somewhere) and to blog about it, possibly relating it to these very important experiences, and of course, I’ll keep talking about the job hunt, which is now to pick up significantly since there are a lot of deadlines coming up soon, and I want to jump on any opportunities that I can.

For now, though, it is enough that it’s done, and forward I go.

No, not student teaching (not quite yet – 1.5 days left).

I’m referring to my culminating projects of my undergraduate career: two Candidate Assessments that are essentially the capstone of my degree program. I am exhausted and probably not ready to do much more reflection (I did probably 15 pages of it just tonight!), but at least I can rejoice at this fact: it is done!

The only real step between me and certification now is the APT (Assessment of Professional Teaching) test that I’ll be taking in a few weeks, and then graduation…and then two weeks of middle school certification courses. But then I will really be done, and this teaching thing will be mine. (And of course, the job hunt continues in the meantime.)

Now I must go sleep, briefly but (hopefully) blissfully.

Only three (and a half) days left.

It’s very difficult for me to believe that my student teaching experience is almost over. After 13 weeks, I find this realization sort of bittersweet: I am ready to relinquish the responsibility and stress that goes with the job, but I am equally regretful about missing out on all the good things – my students, mostly, and all of the little things that have gone along with teaching them.

Case in point: Friday was my last day of teaching the eighth graders (we had finished all the material I was going to cover, but my co-op for that class was gone, so I filled in), and so I decided that I wanted to have them help me put together a book that I could leave the class with, containing all of the things that they wanted to contribute. Initially, I told them that I’d like to have a collection of the things they think are important for other students their age to know, in case I ever teach middle school/junior high again and want to share some thoughts with my future students, but what they gave me were a lot of things that we’d shared as a class: puns, inside jokes, and yes, even some wisdom. More importantly, though, they shared themselves with me; one student who I’d had so many problems with shared a journal entry from very early in the semester about how I was one of three “most hated” (or “disliked,” I can’t remember which) people, but the up side of that was the fact that they all made it clear to me that I didn’t fit into that category any more. I will miss them dearly, even despite having so many struggles with them in the process of trying to help them learn, and this was a good way to end my teaching.

Really, my teaching in many ways is already done: I still technically have the juniors through Wednesday (Thursday is a half day and when all of the classes will have parties to see me off), but I don’t have any more lessons to teach. The juniors are watching a little bit of Our Town tomorrow (the Lincoln Theatre version with Hal Holbrook as the Stage Manager), and then they’ll be giving presentations on Tuesday and Wednesday. Everything is really winding down for me, and it’s both relieving and disconcerting. I mean, it’ll be a nice break to get back to my other responsibilities as a student (the downside of being a student teacher), father, and all-around workaholic. On the other hand, I don’t know how I’ll keep myself from being too restless now that I’ve really done this teaching thing; maybe the job hunt will help. I do have several schools and positions that I’m looking at, so that should help motivate me to find a good district where I can grow as an educator and can try to make the most out of my first year out of the gate.

But the best thing I can say right now: it was worth it. Every minute of it.

I have learned and grown so much as a teacher and as a person, and I do feel so much more prepared to do this thing called teaching for a career. I have had great role models, and I know what worked for me and what very clearly didn’t, and the whole experience gave me a great deal of perspective. I had plenty of frustrating moments, but I know that I’ve done something worthwhile, and that alone makes me so much more satisfied with my experience. (Let’s face it: it would be very easy to think this a waste, given that I lost income and time in the process, if I hadn’t found myself in a better position as a result. Intrinsic benefits are great, and sometimes they really do outweigh those extrinsics which are such a prevalent aspect of life.)

So even though this stage is almost over, with its joys and struggles, more lies ahead. Forward is graduation (and my final classes for middle school certification, but that’s okay) and then on to whatever job is out there for me.

And lots more learning.

A very quick note (I type this as my 2nd hour seniors are silently reading Elie Wiesel’s Night): Today has been the best start of a day since I have been student teaching. My eighth graders have been very difficult to please, and they have given me hell as a result (I guess because I’m not entertaining enough), but today, something worked!

The something was an idea I’d seen somewhere on the ‘Net, an “I Am/We Are” poem. The idea is to have students write several lines of alternating statements about themselves individually (“I Am”) and the group (“We Are”). (I encouraged students to write statements using other verbs but in the same format, e.g. “I have a great sense of humor.”) This idea strikes me as a very good one for middle school/junior high because it respects students’ individual opinions and allows a safe outlet (relatively so, at least) for expressing them.

And it worked like I had wanted: the students wrote some interesting statements about themselves and the class. To make things interesting, I had the students write 12 lines, 6 of each type, and then I had the students contribute a line each from their own poems to make a class poem; odd numbered students would contribute “I Am” statements, while even numbered students will give “We Are” statements. (I have 13 students in this class, and one was absent, so it worked out nicely.) After all of the 12 lines had been written on the board, the students wanted to end the poem on a different note, so two more students contributed an additional line, the concluding line being “We’re not weird; we’re just ourselves.”

It is a magnificent feeling after having so much trouble with this class. One student who I have had many conflicts with actually said that they were proud of me for coming up with something they actually liked, and I thanked her (privately) for saying such a nice thing to me. As a result, I’m on cloud nine – this shows that I can have success, and to a large degree, even a moderate success in a sea of failures can make the whole thing seem worthwhile.

Today has been a long day, one without the comfort of my cooperating teacher (who is away dealing with the death of her mother). I have had a very capable substitute teacher (who is actually an English teacher who will be looking for a position next fall – my competition!), but it has truly felt like my own class in terms of dealing with matters myself. One student in an early class refused to do the task I had given, insteading preferring to do an assignment for another class, and I told him once to put it away. He acted like he did, but I promptly found him doing the same. I told him he had a detention, but even this did not stop him – I had to go so far as to take away the book and worksheet he was using. I followed through, though; he should have received the detention slip a few periods later.

I also had to deal with a problem that has bugged me for the longest time, a problem that I suspected might come up given the nature of my high school students (who are in fairly advanced honors and AP courses).

We have been covering T.S. Eliot this week, reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Hollow Men,” both some of my favorite poems ever. They have been less than enthusiastic (the typical response to “Prufrock” was “It’s so random!”), but things sort of came to a head today.

My main method for looking at the texts is to examine the major images used in them; for instance, the mermaids are incredibly significant to the meaning of “Prufrock” (e.g. “I do not think that they [the mermaids] will sing to me”). I did this for both poems, and I told them today that I would give them a quiz tomorrow asking them to give the significance of some of the images, following thereafter with a recap of the images they found in the poem. My first class did fine with this, but the second decided they would be difficult.

The problem came when I told a student that their interpretation of an element (the yellow smoke at the beginning of “Prufrock”) wasn’t really to the point; he said it symbolized baldness in that it hides who you really are, thereby creating a veil of yellow smoke. While this isn’t a bad image to paint, I told him that it didn’t really get to the point of the image (which is to symbolize death or to create a feeling of mystery or haziness). This apparently brought up some pent-up emotions, as one student (who undoubtedly has the highest grade in the course) then proceeded to tell me that I should just tell them the answers rather than asking them (after telling me that they haven’t learned anything in the class, which warms my heart so).

This is a major problem in education that I have resented for ages: the tendency to indicate to students that learning is about getting the right information from the teacher that is then regurgitated back. I admit that a fair amount of “regurgitation” is simply a part of modern education, for better or worse, but I hate – hate, hate, hate – the idea that the teacher is the one responsible for making the facts available. What happened to the idea of teachers facilitating learning? What about student input? Why don’t they care about that?

I don’t want to remove all responsibility from the students in this regard, but I am fairly certain that this is somewhat symptomatic of a major failing of modern education. Students have been given so many goals that in so many cases incorporate rote knowledge that they have begun to associate it with learning, to define learning by it. This is of course horribly false in multiple levels. But students have become so used to assessments that involve memorization – or prefer it because it’s easy – that they don’t even think of learning as something that they do.

I don’t know entirely how to deal with this, except perhaps not to give in to these implicit “demands,” but I know I hate it. I know that students need to see how they construct knowledge – and they do this in my class! But they don’t see it, or they are more concerned about constructing knowledge based on poor logic or reasoning. Instead, they see me a “gatekeeper” figure who approves their responses – which I have to be, but they see it as an inherently unfair position. I don’t know how to convince them that I’m trying to be fair and consider different viewpoints as long as they are reasonable; they simply don’t like the subjectivity. But life is full of it, and they won’t be served well by thinking of life as a big multiple-choice question, the answer to which they can simply memorize in order to survive.

My only consolation is tell myself, “They’ll learn some day.” But that is a small comfort for being attacked as a bad teacher, unfair and unwilling to lay out all of the answers in neat little packages for quick consumption.

As I think about this, I have to sigh and remember that I can only do so much. I want to change more than I am capable of, and this might be the hardest thing (although I keep coming up with more and more “hardest things” as the days go on).

We’ll see how things go from here.

On the up side, I took the liberty of having the students make a very large card – a folded display board for presentations – and sign it for my co-op, which I’m hoping she will be somewhat comforted by. Despite all of my struggles in the classroom, her problems right now are far greater, and this day will be a success if she at least enjoys the card and the sentiment behind it. If I remember that perspective, then I might be better off in the long run.

As of tomorrow, I will have only two weeks left of student teaching.

That is an absolutely insane feeling, for two reasons: 1) It doesn’t feel like this should be over this quickly (although it felt like it was dragging much earlier in the process) and 2) I don’t know what I’m going to do after this is over! Well, in a sense, I do, but it will be extremely odd not to be here everyday.

I am also starting to give back classes, another sure indicator that my time here is drawing nigh. I will have one class – the one with which I have had the best success and rapport – all the way to the last day I am here, but it will also be somewhat welcome to have more free time at school to do my planning and to work on my Teacher Work Sample, which is due in about a week. That itself will be quite time-consuming, although – sorry, education professors – probably not very useful in the long run.

I will eventually reflect back on the whole experience, but not now – I’m too close still. I will need some space before I can really look back with any sort of accuracy to evaluate the value of my experience and my own efforts during this time.

My hope, however, is that I will have indeed found some useful ideas for use in my own classroom and for the search for a position, a search that I am currently engaging in. I am hopeful to that regard as well, but I honestly don’t know what to expect. One unfortunate thing that has occurred during this experience is a decrease in confidence; teaching, unlike many things that I have ever done, is simply too hard to come naturally, and I consequently am acutely aware of my own limitations, especially for things like classroom management. I know I can improve, and I am aware as well of how I need to improve, but the experience still has a somewhat disconcerting effect on me.

No matter. I’ve made a commitment to this vocation, and I intend to follow through. We’ll only have to see what happens from here.