inheritance

On Wednesday we had a rousing little session with a few people from the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation. With the prospect of running my own classroom looming in the next couple weeks, I'm absorbing very little of the teaching-related advice from this week, so listening to S.G. and my classmates talk about the civil rights history of Mississippi was a welcome change of pace. Besides being something different, though, the talk was also something inspiring--in the true, rejuvenating breath-of-air sense of the word. To be honest, I had never considered how teaching a messianic view of civil rights history, centered around MLK Jr. (and a few others), could paralyze kids who--quite understandably--didn't consider themselves superheroes. And here's the William Winter Institute telling us that they've just gotten a bill passed that will require public schools to teach comprehensive, interdisciplinary civil rights history! Teachers expanding Mississippi children's notions of how they can change their society!

It was flattering too, when S.G. told us that we were "the natural inheritors of the civil rights movement in Mississippi." I want to believe her; social justice is as big a reason for why I'm here as any other. But hearing such a strong affirmation of that purpose from someone else, I also find myself frightened, even resistant to it. After all, that's a tough act to follow. Is the civil rights movement in Mississippi really in good hands then? I'm clumsy; I drop things; what if I drop it? What does it mean for the cause of social justice if I'm spending my first 9 weeks just trying to stay afloat?

Ben was helpful in putting this into perspective: realistically, the social justice / civil rights side of teaching is something I'll come back to when I get my feet under me, mid-year-ish or whenever. I just hope that my flailing attempts at pedagogy until then won't create more obstacles to justice and my students' awareness of it.

Assignment: Taped Lesson Redux

Some thoughts on my second videotaped attempt at teaching: I've got a bit more poise. Of course, it helped to be teaching a class of 4 adults rather than 20 7th-graders. Body language, speaking volume, movement around the room were all good and improved from last time. There were significant holes in that poise though, the most unpleasant and embarassing of which has to be all the stuttering and hesitation in my set. Jeez. I was more nervous playing the part of a teacher last week than I was actually teaching during summer school, so I'm willing to blame some of that awful stuttering on my poor acting abilities. It definitely wasn't easy asking questions of my peers as if they were middle-schoolers while being prepared for--even expecting--their appropriately grad-student level responses. But even still, it was horribly mortifying (wasn't this something I had gotten over, more or less?) to watch and couldn't have been easy for students to understand. The real deal in the fall may not feel contrived and intimidating for the same reasons, but I'll undoubtedly be nervous, especially when it comes time for my principal or anyone else to evaluate me.

In terms of positive measures I can take to avoid all this, better preparation and familiarity with my lesson plan can help. I sounded a lot better once the set was finished; my big problem seemed to be with not knowing the line of questioning I wanted to take. I'd struggle to form a question the right way, when I should really know beforehand (by heart) how I want the questions in my set to follow each other.

There were other things that I'm also concerned about: not being consistent and specific with student praise; getting stuck in a single questioning strategy, especially the order of student's name and question; sounding tentative in transitions and while introducing activities; and weak-sounding or nonexistent reminders of group procedures. Let's hope I can speak clearly enough to even begin working on those.

Thankfully, I'm pretty sure the rest of the week went better than that lesson looked. With proper reflection, improvement is pretty much unavoidable. And that's encouraging.

against ed jargon

This is a minor complaint, but so it goes. I was talking with another first-year the other day about the silliness of all this education terminology and he told me that he had been chastised in his evaluation for writing his objective as "You will" instead of the canonical (and research-proven, I assume?) "The student will..." I'm all for displaying the topic for each day's lesson on the board and repeating it out loud--it's good sense to tell students what you're going to teach before you teach it. But why should the objective be phrased so awkwardly, so formally? It's as if we're encouraging students to embrace the depersonalized language of state standards. Of course, maybe that's the idea. Personally, I don't think my students should have to copy down "The student will analyze and evaluate vocabulary usage based on appropriateness for content and purpose" if they aren't even sure what "analyze and evaluate" means. My job, as I see it, is to spin that mass of jargon into a question they can understand and get excited about. But some teachers don't care about engaging their kids and maybe they're the reason for this rigidity on writing "The student will (Bloom's verb) etc." I can see how requiring teachers to put the same standard objectives on their board might keep them more accountable--it's far easier to compare and evaluate teachers if they're ostensibly teaching the exact same thing. Still, I can't see how it helps students to tell them what they're going to learn in the driest and most didactic manner possible.

a thought on classroom management

This originally came up after we saw the classroom management presentations, but I sat on it, for whatever reason. I've felt as though our classes have placed an enormous emphasis on the importance of rules and the unflinching, lightning-quick application of consequences to classroom management. Now, I wouldn't dispute that consistency and non-hesitation in discipline matters are essential to being a successful teacher and maybe the hardest thing about teaching for me. But it was interesting to hear Jess and Jake (two of the finest MTC'ers around, from what I hear) both stress in their presentations that the teacher has to meet his/her students halfway. What I think they were getting at was that good classroom management comes as much, probably more, from good planning--preventing problems--as it does from "pulling the trigger" on problems once they arise.

This was a welcome point to me, as I've felt a little uncomfortable with the teaching philosophy that seems to accompany advice on being sterner, quicker on the draw, etc. It's definitely helpful to remember that "students should be doing at least half the work" and that you're punishing the behavior, not the student; these are messages I'm trying to take to heart and I'm sure they're sound advice on how to survive in a very difficult situation. But I've also felt like embracing that advice too wholeheartedly would lead me away from the kind of teacher I want to be, towards something more authoritarian (to use that incredibly loaded terminology). So, on a personal level, lesson planning as proactive classroom management is an appealing idea.

I also think, however, that we should all be hearing that message a bit more. For one, I think we exhausted the different ways you could say "Pull the trigger sooner" and "Don't worry about being fair" in the first two days of class. Advice on how to plan lessons that will keep kids on task, on the other hand, can take many different and more specific forms. And second, I've heard a couple second-years remark (off the record) that their first-years are a bit too trigger happy, especially considering that we probably won't have such out-of-classroom support for our discipline decisions this next year. So why not spend more time on how to plan a good lesson than on how to feel okay about giving a kid detention?

To be fair, this TEAM business coming up sounds like it's supposed to do just that. And we probably will learn a fair amount about planning lessons, even if the master teachers are as mean as everyone says. But what we're missing out on, in teaching a room of adults, is the opportunity to really put our lessons to the test, seeing how well they can organize a bunch of kids. I think it's a fantastic idea to have a second summer school session (though I definitely won't want to get roped into it as a 2nd-year), but in order to be an improvement, it needs to be structured as practice in both the rules & consequences side to classroom management and the good lesson planning side.

Assignment: Videotaped Lesson

Watching myself teach was instructive, if a little painful. Aside from the petty things (not liking the sound of my voice, etc.) there were a good number of things that I was vaguely aware I shouldn't/should be doing that I'm now determined to fix. First up: I speak too fast, yet also with too much hesitation and to many "um's." What Ben said about brevity--teachers have a limited number of words for the year that can reach their students and first-years using those up in the first month--seems to ignore a bit of how teaching personalities can vary, but it also rings true in my case. If I restate something two or three times, without being asked to by my students, I waste instructional time. If the students don't understand, they will/should raise their hands and ask me to explain. And if I speak slowly, I can choose my words more carefully the first time, my students will process what I say better, and I may not have to repeat myself at all. It comes back to the idea of taking the onus off of me to do all the work, I guess.

Second: I was too hestitant, too inconsistent, and too accommodating with discipline procedures. I should've gotten everyone who spoke out of turn, instead of the one or two necessary to calm the room down once talking had gotten somewhat out of hand. And if they protest having their names on the board, I shouldn't answer them at all, but just add checks for continuing to talk out.

And last: I must do a better job of explaining the directions for assignments. This one was fairly clear (write a business letter to one of these two people about one of these four topics) but even still, I spent a lot of my walk-around time answering basic questions. My explanation of the letter assignment wasn't as clear as it could have been and I didn't model an example for the kids. I'm still getting used to how much further you need to break things down for middle-schoolers and it was clear that I overestimated what they could pick up from written and verbal directions without an example.

What I did well: I looked enough like a teacher, even if I didn't speak like one. Generally speaking, posture, moving around the room, and physical presence were all positive. Speaking volume was adequate, though I could stand to vary everything a little more, to keep kids on their toes. I didn't exactly know what to do with my hands, but I imagine that will come with better planned lessons. Best of all, I seemed very helpful while the kids were working individually. Not too surprising, since one-on-one interaction is what I enjoy the most and feel most comfortable with, but it's good to know my strengths.