Away in Wayland

Assigned: Reflection on Summer Lessons

2007-06-27T16:59:00.000-07:00

In my evaluations of my first-years' lessons, I would often (less so now, as they've really improved on it) focus on the wording and scope of their objectives. I didn't like harping on such an Ed. School-y thing; I hate the empty jargon and (excessive) obsession with standards that permeates education as much, if not more, than I did last year. But, the past year has taught me that in this position--being a teacher and being in Teacher Corps-- a certain amount of compromise is necessary. I felt like I needed to at least tell my first years how to play the game, whether or not they believed in all of it.

All of that said, when I consider the differences between my most and least successful lessons this summer, one of the clearest distinctions is in the scope (not the wording, which I think I've mostly figured out at this point) of my objectives. On the most-successful side, my lesson on multiple-meaning words was very focused--the students had to show, by the end of the period, that they could use different meanings of the same words. This was probably not a particularly hard objective for my students to master, but I did give them a list of 8th-grade-level vocabulary that they had to use and almost every student made a passing grade. Aside from the objectives, this lesson also offered the students more opportunities for participation. I began the lesson, after my set, by giving students cards with definitions for a multiple-meaning word. The students had to walk around the room and find the other student who had a different definition for the same word. Although this was a pretty hard exercise for most of them, I think they really enjoyed moving around and that it actually helped them conceptualize multiple-meanings.

I would consider my lesson on organizational patterns in texts to be my worst because its objectives were far too broad to cram into two 50 minute periods. I had hoped that students would be able to define each of the five major textual organization patterns (sequential order, order of important, cause & effect, compare & contrast, main idea & details), recognize them in texts and apply that knowledge to reading comprehension. Needless to say, I was far too ambitious. Because I wanted to force so much material into the students' heads, I rushed through my set and explanation of each pattern and set them loose on a group activity that they weren't really prepared for.

Our instructional procedures have worked fairly well. I like making my "Do Now" an engaging, un-intimidating assignment that I can steer towards the day's objective during my set. Sharing answers to the Do Now gets students participating early and sets a good precedent for the rest of the period. In evaluations, I've paid a fair amount of attention to questioning strategies, as much for myself as for my first-years. Frequent questioning, whether as quick informal assessment or to prompt deeper critical thinking, is something I still need to work on, but when I've put in the effort there, it's paid off in engaging the students more.

My shortcut to differentiate instruction--and, admittedly, still perhaps my primary method--is to speak to students individually during assignments and ask them questions or give them more pointed directions: "Look for (blank) in this paragraph and raise your hand when you've found it," or (after asking a student to explain his/her idea aloud) "Write what you just told me." This is a cop-out, of course. I do target the students who I know will have more trouble with an assignment, but it's not really planned out and it's completely unfeasible with larger classes. In terms of more formal differentiation, I've allowed students to choose different roles (leader, reporter, recorder, reader, etc.) during group activities, tried to include more tactile elements in my lessons, and pulled examples or analogies from a wide variety of sources (an illustration of point of view using video games, for example).

Differentiation and informal assessment are my chief concerns right now for improving student performance. My lessons are still auditory-visual-heavy, and I've seen how much of a difference a small tactile or kinetic component can make in an assignment. Informal assessment is still a weak point for me; I think I frequently mistake students' energy for understanding and I can think of several students from our summer school class for whom the two clearly do not correlate.

Failure Story

2007-06-21T22:39:00.001-07:00

It’s hard to pick out a particular “failure story” from the varied and expansive landscape of failure that was my first year of teaching. It’s hard not just because I look back at my teaching this past year critically and see a lot of failure; it’s also hard because I see how interconnected any discrete shortcoming on my part was with my students’ mistakes, with others of my own, with the myriad injustices of my situation or theirs, and even with my conscious decisions to prioritize some aspects of my job over others. Perhaps it’s my ability to rationalize nearly anything to myself, but I can’t pick out one student, or one specific responsibility I had, and say, “I failed her” or “I failed to do this,” without also seeing where “she failed me,” or “the system failed us both,” or how “I failed to do this because I was also failing somewhere else,” or even “I failed to do this because I was too busy succeeding in this other way.” And all that qualification clearly wouldn’t make for a good story.

Objectively speaking, I think it would be inaccurate to name a particular student my “failure story”; it’s like the converse of the messianic teacher impulse (“I can save a kid myself”) that I try to check in myself. There’s a hidden pride there that I’m wary of. At the same time, I do think of some students as “my failures”—if nothing else, blaming myself alone lets me preserve the hope that my positive impact on students could be that substantial—and so a failure story does fit that subjective look at this past year.

“Ricky” was one of the most intelligent 7th graders I taught, which is to say that he was one of my most intelligent students across the board, as my 7th graders were almost all better readers and writers than my 8th graders. He read books at, and frequently above, his grade level, when many of his peers were reading at a third or fourth grade level. What’s more, he was unfailingly polite and willing to help, if a little shy.

I was delighted to have him in my class, but at the beginning of the year I was far too busy putting out classroom management fires to give him much attention. Thankfully, he seemed mature and self-motivated enough to not require much on my part other than giving him the opportunity to learn. I still felt a little guilty knowing that he wasn’t getting the individual attention or even the well-run classroom that he deserved, because I was trying to handle his classmates, who were busy eating paper, trying to blow pencil shavings at each other, or making sound effects for everything they did. My guilt was only exacerbated by the fact that this was a class of seven students. How could I be this harried with such a small class?

Things didn’t improve with Ricky’s classmates for a while, but for the first semester he endured the chaos of sixth period without complaint. Around the beginning of the second semester, which is embarassingly late (but better than never, I suppose), I finally started making headway with the three discipline cases in the class. That progress came with a cost, though. I’d tried many management strategies with Ricky’s class, and the first thing that showed any signs of working was to take a much more authoritarian (not authoritative) tone with the students—to edge closer to the verbal violence that so many of my students expected from authority figures. In picking the first thing that seemed to work, rather than the one that was best, I ended up straining my relationships with all of the students in Ricky’s class, Ricky included. Class took on a negative tone, and while students would usually do their work, they did it with a scowl on their face and with no motivation to work beyond the minimum requirements. Where before class disruptions would seem to spill over from my students’ excess energy, which I could tap for positive use in my lessons, now they were almost always negative—name-calling, verbal confrontations, and complaining.

From my one year’s experience, 8th graders seem to improve in attitude over the course of the year, while 7th graders seem to get worse, so I wasn’t completely surprised when Ricky started getting caught up in the same negativity as his peers. I was disappointed, though, having seen how mature and self-possessed he’d been earlier in the year. When he started complaining and insulting other students too, I came down hard on him, just like I did with the others, but it only served to antagonize him more. The last straw was, in effect, our final unit in his class, in which we read Monster, a book he’d read a year ago. He complained from the beginning about having to do the same thing over again, and I—burnt out from the year and generally disinclined to let a student from his class do anything other than exactly what I had planned for them—told him that he would have to do the same work as everyone else and that he might find some value in re-reading. When I got around to it (which is to say, rarely), I would plan some alternative, higher-level thinking questions for him to answer about our daily reading, but for the most part, I just let him sit in the back of the classroom, bored and barely pretending to follow along. With hardly any interest in the day’s lesson, he became as big a management problem as anyone else. The rest of the class, even the inveterate discipline problems, were relatively focused on the book, and in my relief at finding something that got them to shut up and participate constructively, I let Ricky slip into a role that should not have been his.

Ricky’s story isn’t a failure story in the sense that he came anywhere near failing my class—he passed with the highest grade. It’s a failure because, by the end of the year, he’d learned to associate English class with being bored, angry, and—to some extent—ignored.

I feel like I failed “Ricky,” but I also know that my failure wasn’t as simple as just not giving him enough attention, encouragement, or individualized instruction. The failure of my classroom management certainly helped turn his class’ environment so negative, but that environment was also shaped by things beyond my control, chiefly perhaps the hormonal tumult of the second semester of 7th grade. But while I’ll concede that Ricky’s transformation from self-motivated and mature to disaffected and apathetic wasn’t entirely my fault, I realize that claiming as my failure can be useful, if I let it remind me of my responsibilities to all of my students, even those who seem like they need me the least.

Assigned: Learning Goals and Instructional Decisions

2007-06-16T10:19:00.000-07:00

Unlike many other second-years, Deb and I have both taught our summer school subject before this session, Deb during last year's summer school and I during the past school year. In preparing an outline of the course, we were able to look over the state frameworks for 8th grade English and pick out the objectives that we knew our students had struggled with. While we couldn't be sure that our students in Holly Springs would have the same problems that mine did this past year and Deb's did last summer, it helped to have some means of narrowing down the maddeningly broad and vague frameworks. (The state frameworks for English are nearly identical from 6th-8th grade). Thus, we'll be spending a lot of time this summer on subject-verb agreement, on following the writing process all the way through, on inferring word meaning from context clues and word structure, on drawing inferences and making predictions based on readings, and on literacy in non-traditional texts (charts and diagrams, forms, reference sources, etc.). For the first week, we chose the objectives that we felt were most fundamental--mostly context clues and word structure, subject-verb agreement, and identifying main idea and details. The first and third are essential for their reading, while the second was one of the most glaring and universal writing issues for my students last year and looks to be equally necessary for these students, given the writing samples we have from the first few lessons.

With the time constraints of a 3-week term and the confusion of having four teachers, we'll need to put as much continuity as possible in our sequencing of the objectives; there's a tendency, I think, to hopscotch around without much sense when trying to fit so much material into so little time. So, for example, I've planned to hit author's purpose and the fact-opinion distinction before we get to persuasive techniques and persuasive writing, and compare-and-contrast writing before figurative language (so that we can teach metaphors, similes, and co. as forms of comparison).

Along with the state frameworks, we have another master to serve, in the form of this EBS assessment business, which is apparently a district or county requirement. In short, the requirement is that--if the majority of our class that is listed as EBS is to pass--we must assess and document their mastery of 80% of the objectives on a list that more or less corresponds to the MS frameworks. But here's the rub: our EBS students all have different objectives that they need to master. So we've also had to focus our objectives on the skills that most of our students need to master to be promoted. Of course, there are objectives that only a few students didn't master during the school year; those we'll cover in remediation outside of regular class periods.

The inductive strategy that I've used is concept attainment. As a Do Now for our first lesson on word structure, I gave every student a set of six index cards; each set was made up of words that had prefixes and others that did not ("possible" and "inaccurate," for example). The students had to come up with some criteria for dividing the words into two groups. Without telling the students to look for prefixes, most divided the words by whether or not they had a prefix. They were able to recognize prefixes without being specifically told to do so and developed a concept of prefixes that we were able to build off of with a more formal definition. Later, when creating a list of common prefixes and their meanings, I had the students find the meanings of the prefixes inductively, by giving them a list of familiar words that used a particular prefix. The students had to induce a meaning of the prefix from the meanings of those known words.

Growth

2007-05-14T20:09:00.000-07:00

Herding kids off campus on Friday, I heard something that cast a shadow over the weekend: Catrice was coming back.

Catrice was in my homeroom for the first half of the first nine weeks, but in that brief time she provided some of my best what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here stories. Brash and tall, with her hair cut close and bleached blond, she stuck out among the generally meek and gawky kids in her class. She was 15, in the 7th grade, and read at a 2nd grade level, maybe. Homeroom is supposed to be silent reading. She also had spent part of last year in a mental institution, until she was kicked out for assaulting a nurse. Somehow, she was allowed to enroll with us, rather than the alternative school.

Naturally, she didn't have much interest in reading and spent homeroom talking. She’d prop her feet on the desk or make bizarre noises designed to get my attention. After trying and failing to deal with her in the classroom, I'd send her to the office. They'd send her back. Fine.

Then, Catrice started taking an interest in me. She began by commenting on my clothes, then on my hair. Then she moved on to trying to touch my hair. If I was standing next to her while talking to another student, she would lean backwards and stretch, brushing the back of my head. I’d back away and tell her to stop. Eventually, she started growling at me. I'd write it up and tell her it was inappropriate, but my principal did nothing, and nothing changed.

For one glorious, week-long respite, Catrice was absent. My homeroom looked entirely different while she was gone: kids had their noses buried in books, and hardly anyone talked. I found out that she had had to go to court for beating up her stepfather. I wondered how we could allow her in the same room as those angels.

After a week, Catrice returned and, perhaps sensing that she was on her way out, turned up the charm. Despite all of our preparation on sexual harassment, up to that point I hadn't really thought of her behavior as such—more as inappropriate or generally crazy. Then came the day she propped her leg up on her desk, as I was walking past her. That managed to get my attention and as I looked at her, she stared me in the eye and growled, while stroking her thigh. I was stunned. The next day, she was taken away by the police for some other reason that I still don’t know, and I was free to fight for quiet with the rest of my homeroom.

So, I was a little anxious to find out that she'd be returning. Why would we let any student return for just the last week of school, let alone one who last left school in handcuffs? I asked my principal about it; he hadn't even heard about her coming back. I asked the assistant principal; she said Catrice was back from "the home," whatever that means, and that there was nothing we could do if she wanted to enroll. I told both of them that I wouldn’t let her in, that I didn’t want her in my class. "No one does," the assistant principal told me.

Sure enough, Catrice showed up this morning, but at first I didn't recognize her. The most lasting visual memory I’d had of her was from “Tacky Day,” part of our spirit week before Homecoming. Catrice, however, went beyond tacky, to truly scary; she wore a blue silk bathrobe, a thick brown wig, fake eyeglasses, and a set of rubber teeth that looked like they came from the costume department of a zombie movie.

Now Catrice was taller, much taller. Her hair was long—I don’t know if it was her own or a weave, but it looked much nicer than anything she’d had before. And most strikingly, she didn't have the crazed look in her eyes I'd seen before. You could see her thinking.

"Good morning, Mr. Schaefer," she said.

"Uh...good morning, Catrice,” I stammered. “Are you going to be in this class?" I was sure she knew what I wanted to hear.

"Yeah, they said that I should go back to my old classes."

"Oh, okay," I said. And then, trying to conceal my disappointment, "Well how are you?"

"I'm good. A lot calmer."

I wanted to say, "Yes, you are," but that didn't seem right. She was calm, though. Even as the rest of my homeroom girls crowded around her, a couple of them showing out for her the way they used to, her voice stayed low, in control. What had they done to her at "the home?" If this was Catrice, why not take her back?

A few minutes later, my ever-tactful assistant principal poked her head in the door and warned me, "Mr. Schaefer, your girl is here." And to make things completely clear, "'Catrice is here."

"Thanks, Mrs. Carter, she's right here in my room."

"Oh."

She didn't stay long after all. The counselor pulled her out and I heard later that she was being sent to the alternative school after all, which makes sense. If any of her classes were working at this point, she wouldn't be prepared for them. But still, I felt a little regret that I wouldn't be able to witness this new, reformed Catrice.

It's telling that, for a turnaround as dramatic as Catrice's to take place (assuming it wasn't all just good behavior for her first day back), you need to take someone out of our school. Too many of my students need whatever she got and have instead been allowed to run further in the wrong direction. While I doubt anyone sees it like this, sending Catrice to the alternative school might be protecting her from us more than it is the other way around.

scandal

2007-05-10T15:07:00.000-07:00

In a piece I wrote this fall but never posted, I talked about the internal politics of my school and how they were mostly playing out along racial lines. In short, there appeared (and still, for the most part, appears) to be good camaraderie among the teachers at my school, a remarkable thing for an integrated faculty on the black side of a de facto segregated school district. But our principal has been a divisive force. By mid-year, his passivity and incompetence had infuriated many teachers, and faculty meetings were as tense and outright confrontational as his spinelessness would allow. I couldn't help noticing, though, that the most vocal criticism always came from white teachers. They would complain about discrepancies in the way he treated black and white teachers (e.g. letting my black team member arrive at school halfway through homeroom every day, but telling a young white teacher that she was probably being sexually harassed by students because she wore open-toed shoes) and wax nostalgic about last year's principal. True, last year's principal sounds great, like a real teacher's principal; she spent much of the principal's fund on photocopies and dry erase markers for teachers, while this year's spent it on a new desk and paint job for his office. But she was also white, and our principal this year is black. And it was discouraging to see how quickly our faculty could split along racial lines, with the white faction buzzing through the winter about filing grievances with our district office.

A lot of the unrest quieted down over the spring semester. Our principal may have improved some, but I think it had much more to do with people's complacency and their familiarity with chaos and incompetence trumping whatever racial tension was bubbling underneath. But now that tension seems to be manifesting itself on a larger scale.

An unintended consequence of trying to stay out of office politics is that I am often completely surprised by certain announcements. The most recent one came early last week, when all district employees received an email from our district superintendent saying that he was resigning, that he'd enjoyed working with us, and would miss all of us. Resigning, mind you, with two weeks of school left. The email began, "As many of you have already heard," but of course I'd heard nothing about this and had to ask several teachers to fill in the details. From them and from our local paper (which I never read, shame on me), this is what I've figured out:

As early as May 3, there were rumors that the school board was asking for the superintendent's resignation, but the formal announcement wasn't made until almost a week later. The case against him is legitimate: the district hasn't made as much progress as the board would like; the assistant superintendent had recently resigned and is filing a gender-discrimination suit against him; and he tried to not renew the contract of the music teacher at my school, a decision the board overturned. I've had hardly any personal experience with him, but he never struck me as particularly exciting or effective. To be honest, I'd suspected that he was using the job to live out his boy-band fantasies. On two different occasions, our district convocation at the beginning of the year and our district-wide Christmas program, he's monopolized the stage and microphone so that he could sing--"I Believe I Can Fly," supported by interpretive dancers from the white high school, and some falsetto R&B version of "Silent Night," respectively.

But some people liked him. I asked Mrs. GE, the oldest teacher at my school, about the whole affair recently, and she told me that a lot of people felt he was the kind of person who could bring the district together, integrate it, even. "Some people don't want to change," she said, meaning the white power structure in town.

Whether or not our superintendent was pushing for integration, his dismissal has brought the ugly side of race relations in our town back into the light. The school board is composed of five old men, one black president, three white members, and another black member. The vote to ask for the superintendent’s resignation was 4 to 1, the one vote against coming from the black member. He was quoted in the local paper as saying that he wanted history to remember that he opposed the decision. Parents on the black side of town are well aware of what this looks like and called the board out at its most recent meeting after the decision. From the quotes I found in our local paper, it sounds as though this was the last straw for many people. There are threats of a lawsuit over the district’s de facto segregation; I don’t know how often the topic is raised, but it sounds convincing.

Dr. Mullins told us this semester—and I fully believe him—that appointing superintendents, rather than electing them, is generally a better way of filling the position, since it usually allows the board to cast a wider net for candidates and keeps petty local politics out of the process. I don’t have all the facts, of course, but this seems to be a case where local politics need to be involved in the process.

My students are only catching onto the story slowly. True, they’re in middle school, so I’m not surprised that it’s not the first thing on their minds. I wonder though, how much of my school’s community cares enough about this to really oppose the decision, support the aforementioned lawsuit, or at least organize around the next school board elections. Complacency has roots almost as deep as racism down here.

First Semester Reflection

2006-12-09T07:41:00.000-08:00

The semester's not over, but it's close enough. This has been, without a doubt, the most difficult thing I've ever had to and I'm still not entirely sure I'm cut out for it. But my problems have been mostly what I expected. Chief among those would be the difficulty I have had with classroom management and with my seventh-graders especially, who have become comfortable and less easily controlled. These problems have dogged my efforts thus far and, as expected, correspond to my still-inadequate work ethic and organization. The small successes I have had have almost always coincided with days when I have a more detailed lesson plan and my papers are closer to order. I have experienced a few of those wonderful improvised mini-lessons or explanations, but their effectiveness is directly related to my confidence, which is itself dependent on my being organized and prepared.

One of the rudest and most immediate shocks of my teaching experience has been the difficulty of maintaining order in a classroom at my school. Because it lacks real walls, my school sounds and feels like the students are more in charge than the teachers. Our administration does little, if anything, to dispel that feeling. The harshest reality of classroom management in my school is that my classroom is not entirely my own, because I can be interrupted or drowned out by a noisy class next door or in the hall. Another shock has been the level of disrespect that students expect that they can get away with; too often they are right. Showing respect to my students—at least what I consider respect—has not proven especially effective at establishing a different climate in my classroom. Authoritarian language and posturing (not disrespect, per se, so much as a harshness that feels foreign to me) instead, have seemed to earn me more respect and ended problems more quickly.

Management Part II: Sticking to it

2006-11-17T13:34:00.000-08:00

I seem to begin all of my assigned posts by describing how, well actually, I didn't really do the assignment exactly as it was intended, really. This one's no different. The assignment: enforce every rule and consequence all the time, every time, for two weeks. A tough one, to be sure, which is why Ben said we only had to do it with one class. If the assignment has taught me anything, it's that I'm truly horrible at consistent enforcement. What I ended up doing was more like consistently enforcing rules and consequences for one class for a couple days, then switching to a different class for another two days, then having a bad day and falling apart for every period, then coming back strong at the beginning of every single period but easing up midway through.

That's not to say I didn't try. I started every day of the past two weeks (and most periods, even) mentally resolving to be the drill sergeant I need to be. But the flesh is weak. Often, I'd start the period draconian and consistent about students talking, not getting to work on time, etc. but find myself needing to send a student to the office. Dealing with that, I'd either miss a few infractions or just be so relieved to get the problem student out that I'd ease up on everyone else for a while. From there it was a slippery slope toward chaos.

Not that I'm completely inept or a total pushover, though (despite what my students may say/think about me). I did find that the weeks of being more hardcore, if not completely so, have helped diminish the constant talking and especially the verbal disrespect. Whether through example or some change in my tone/posture/whatever, my warnings and directions seem to carry a little more weight than they did previously. And on my better days (or rather, better periods, of which I've had maybe 3), when I'm catching every infraction and still moving the class forward at a good clip, things just seem to get better and better, with negative consequences becoming more effective and the class points and verbal praise piling up (at least until a kid swipes another kid's pencil and I'm suddenly trying to prevent World War III).

So, to sum up: I'm still no paragon of consistency, but I know that I can be better about enforcement and I've seen enough to know how much easier my life could be if I was. As I said in my last management post, I don't think my rules need to be changed. My negative consequences haven't changed officially, except that I now move from one writing assignment to detention and that I've gone back to holding my own d-hall after sending weeks' worth of lists to the office and never seeing my students in the school-wide one. My positive consequences do seem a little sparse, Student of the Week having fallen by the wayside temporarily, but I'm confident they could work if I stick to SoW and the weekly class rewards.

high expectations

2006-11-15T20:40:00.000-08:00

I was afraid that reading e.e. cummings with my 7th graders would be an instance of setting my expectations a little too high. After all, I don't think I was ready for him at their age and I also don't want to give them any more bad-grammar role models than they already have. The poem we were reading ("anyone lived in a pretty how town," for a pronouns unit) has some especially knotty lines. But once I coaxed them past their initial frustration and knee-jerk dismissal ("This guy writes like a sped kid!"), they proved those fears wonderfully unfounded. After only one reading, a girl picked up that it was a story about a couple, something I thought I'd have to drill into them. The concept of pronouns becoming characters clicked as soon as I showed it to them. My favorite, though, had to be the K-Train's revelation to me at the end of class:

"Mr. Wayland, he writes funny."
"What do you mean?"
"He says things backwards."

It deserved a pound, but my hands were occupied, so I had to resort to a "fantastic." Which of course it was.

I'm trying to give my 8th-graders the same treatment, but they seem more likely to get frustrated or indignant when I ask them to think. Still, I got to write the ladder of moral obligations, "Obey God, Obey King, Obey Father," on the board and hint at the consequences of a character's breaking the bottom one. At least one girl seemed to be getting it. It's not so far to "Paradise Lost" from here.

Classroom Management Revisited

2006-11-11T11:08:00.000-08:00

Looking back at my classroom management plan from the summer, I'm not sure I could give a fair assessment of its success. My biggest problem has been and continues to be consistency in enforcing my rules and consequences. So I can't really say whether or not the plan's worked because I haven't yet implemented it properly. I'm much better about enforcement at the beginning of class, but I still get lax partway through a class or midway through the week. The solution is simple enough, but this consistency and assertiveness business seems to be my personal weakness--not something I'm proud to admit, as it's the foundation of being able to teach at all.

I've considered the possiblity that my rules are simply out of sync with what I can reasonably expect of my students. A while ago, Austin and I talked about this in terms of his classes. He'd decided that his rule prohibiting any talking in class was unreasonable and that he had to loosen up on that front. I was a little skeptical, but I understood where he was coming from. But as for doing something like that myself--I don't have two years of teaching under my belt and I think I have a signficantly different teacher personality than him. My rules are unreasonable given how little my students respect me, but I know enough not to compromise on my rules for that.

So what do I see in my classroom management plan now, three and half months wiser? Naivete mostly. I knew that I should want my classroom a certain way and that I needed to require certain behavior of my students to get it and keep it that way, but I didn't have the conviction, bred of experience, to back that up with action. The procedures, rules, and consequences that I wrote then are still what I want now; having tried to teach a class in which those things aren't followed, it's clear to me now why I want them.

you know my (learning) steez

2006-10-14T01:26:00.000-07:00

We were required to give a "learning styles inventory" to our students and report on the findings. "What," you ask, "is a learning styles inventory?" A personality test, of sorts, and about as precise as those ones you find in supermarket-checkout-aisle magazines, I'd say. That may not be fair--I do believe that we have different learning styles. But I tend to agree with Weims the Drifter when he professes his distrust of self-assessments. Since my interest is, for the most part, in whether my students are "learning" as I define it (rather than as my students might interpret "I learn best when..."), my ideal learning styles inventory would be to teach the same thing many different ways and evaluate how well my students learned myself. There are, of course, problems with that method. Hence, the survey I found and gave, with questions that my students couldn't understand ("supplemented by visual aids and assigned reading") and that focused more on perceived preferences than observed performance.
I found that most of my students were heavily tactile learners, or at least preferred tactile learning. No surprise there, as my observations would fully support the "tactile" part, if not the "learning." I also had more auditory learners than visual learners, which corresponds rather neatly with my students' preference for having texts read to them, rather than reading themselves So despite my reservations about the inventory, it at least corroborated what I was already observing. A more detailed survey might have opened itself up to the problems of self-perceptions but might also have revealed more interesting diversity. The data I have don't tell me much more than that my students seem typical for middle-schoolers.
A reminder of what middle-schoolers are like isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. It helps to be reminded that the rampant touching, a continual issue in my classroom management, is part of a larger tactile mindset that can just as easily be set loose on an activity. It's not always easy to come up with manipulatives or other physical objects for English lessons, but the payoff can be great.

understanding poverty (a little)

2006-09-16T07:57:00.000-07:00

I didn’t expect “A Framework for Understanding Poverty” to engage me as much as it did. Maybe it was the book’s appearance, suspiciously textbook-like. On some level I wanted to believe that what I'm already doing on daily basis, working for/with people in poverty, is the definitive education on poverty. But of course that's silly. The book was not as detached and academic as I'd expected. And more importantly, just being around people in poverty will not automatically teach me how poverty shapes their lives, the ways they think and act. The book's title promised a structure for approaching poverty and that's exactly what I've needed. Like "scaffolding" after the destabilizing experience of trying to deal with my students day in and day out, the book has been valuable. What follows is my thought on a couple of the book's insights I found most compelling.

First of all, the book's profile of people living in poverty, especially in terms of the mental and emotional patterns behind their behavior was interesting--not necessarily new to me, but valuable in that it confirmed what I've already noticed in my students. My students who are quickest to anger, who narrate their every feeling aloud, and who can't think beyond the present are also the ones who loudly announce the arrival of their mother's welfare check or the disconnection of their phone. I'm thinking especially of two of my 8th-graders (who also happen to be some of my brightest students, poverty having nothing to do with innate academic potential). S. and D. are both very bright and vocal, often to the point of disrupting class. D. is also S.'s niece, a familial relationship characteristic of poverty. When I've had conferences or otherwise given consequences to those two, things escalate quickly, with them throwing a fit and me barely able to reach them. The first few times they did this, I would feel helpless and almost frightened, which makes sense if I was engaging with people who don't follow the middle class "hidden rules" I know. It's interesting to compare those incidents with ones where I do reach students. Often those are the ones who appear to come from relatively wealthier homes and who have very involved mothers, mothers who, I've heard, "will beat the black off them if they act up."

So the book's value wasn't so much in teaching me new information as it was in confirming and organizing what I'd already witnessed. But confirmation feels good right now. I was struck by how many of the suggestions for behavioral interventions echoed what we've already been taught about classroom management. It's good to know that the ideal of classroom management I've been working toward (and falling far short of, so far) is appropriate for even my poorest students.

the descent

2006-08-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

Two days in and what do I have to report?

Well, I'm still alive. And no class has been a complete meltdown yet. My work load is about as easy as you could ask for: the "Learning Strategies" periods I was saddled with Thursday turn out to be time for me to assist in other classes and--for now--not even that, just planning periods. I had two on Monday, but today one was turned into another 8th grade section in order to split up my big 8th grade class, which is good. I'm not sure I could've handled those 25 in a single class. As two 15ish periods it will still be a hell of a battle, but one I'm reasonably confident I can win. My two seventh-grade sections got a little bigger today, but they're both still on the small side, thank goodness.

What with schedules changing, experiencing the no-bells-no-walls thing for the first time, and standard rookie troubles, I'd say I haven't been awful. To use Ms. Monroe's metaphor ("You're going to spend the first year with the water here"), I don't feel like I'm really drowning yet. But it is dawning on me how far I am from the good ship MTC Summer Training and that I probably won't last treading water the way I am. Yes, there are new students in every period and I pretty much had to repeat yesterday. I've expected that of the first week. But I'm not doing a good job of setting the tone--work-centered class, and all that. Tomorrow, that changes! My classroom will be a factory.

inheritance

2006-07-20T22:35:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-16T09:48:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-03T11:08:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-03T08:21:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

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.

Assignment: Inductive / Collaborative Learning

2006-06-25T20:08:00.000-07:00

Last week's classes went well. Despite having to prepare 2-3 lessons each day, I felt more comfortable than my first week. So comfortable, in fact, that I used two of the techniques we could choose and reflect on for this week's blog.

First, the inductive "lesson," which was really more of a gesture towards inductive teaching in an otherwise decidedly deductive lesson. On Tuesday, the students were supposed to compose their own persuasive speeches, after hearing and reflecting on some examples on Monday. Instead of giving the usual dry outline of what their speeches should look like, I thought I'd give them an example of a persuasive speech on the overhead and try to coax/trick them into producing their own outline. In this I was fairly unsuccessful, as I couldn't get the answers I was really looking for and (maybe too hastily) resorted to providing them myself. I tried every variation/simplification of the "what is the speaker trying to do/make you feel here?" question, but at best my students would only offer bad paraphrases of the sections I'd make them read.

So, conclusions:
1. Inductive teaching takes more time. This wasn't really an appropriate occasion to use the strategy, because my lesson plan allowed very little time for a collective puzzling out of the speech's outline; I was much more concerned with giving the kids enough time to write their own speeches. To do the technique justice, I would've had to wait these kids out, let them realize what the speaker's intention really was.
2. It needs questions, good ones. My students may not really understand authorial intention that well (beyond the standard "inform, persuade, or entertain" they were taught--deductively!) and they needed better questions than the ones I was asking. If I'd thought it out more ahead of time, I'm sure we could have built from those paraphrases they were giving. But I also should've given them...
3. Multiple examples. Probably why that segment was more like inductive-lite and also why it didn't work. If I'd shown them a few other speeches and compared each section (attention-grabber, overview, etc.) it would have (hopefully) become much more obvious what I meant by "what the speaker is trying to do." Really, without multiple cases, I don't even know if that bit qualifies as inductive at all. Maybe just misguided.

Thank goodness "collaborative learning" (or "working in groups") fared a little better. I used it for our period on revising the persuasive speeches, the same lesson, I might add, for which I was being evaluated. So daring. The plan was to break the class into pairs (I chose them) and have students take turns presenting their speech to their partner, while the partner evaluated their public speaking. After each speech, the speaker did a self-evaluation, while the partner answered some questions about the content/argument of the speech. I collected the self- and peer-evaluations as assessment.

All in all, I think it went swimmingly. As Joe pointed out in his evaluation, the major setback for the lesson was the fact that only half the class had rough drafts to be revised. I decided to move those students who hadn't written a draft yet to one side of the room and make them work on the drafts quietly for the period, while helping the others through their revision activity. Essentially, then, I was teaching two classes, one supposedly silent and one necessarily somewhat noisy. It wasn't perfect, but I think both sides were fairly productive. If I had to do it again, I'd definitely make the no-draft kids serve as peer evaluators for the kids with drafts and then make the whole class write silently for the rest of the period, either revising or composing the first time.

But as it was, the group activity went well. It was a good move to get both speaker and partner to write an evaluation and I was truly impressed with the partner's comments. Biggest lesson from collaborative learning--explain the procedure in excruciating detail. I'm still getting used to what I can expect from middle-schoolers in terms of understanding directions. I did the whole role-play example thing beforehand and got exasperated, "We get it already" looks from some of the kids, but they still needed some reminding and re-explanation to know what they should be doing.

Finally, a Hallmark sentiment to close on: I can't say what the exact causal relationship was last week between my enjoying the teaching better, sleeping more, feeling more confident in front of the class, and planning better/faster, but another good thing wrapped up in all that was the fact that I found myself really, really liking the kids, even the little jerks and sassy mcnasties. Some are bright, some aren't; some want to do well, some couldn't care less; but they've all got their moments.

Assigned: Questioning Techniques

2006-06-17T20:43:00.000-07:00

I used cold-calling, with limited success, in my lesson on tone and imagery. I don't think students were less engaged; it's quite possible they were paying more attention to what their classmates were saying because they might be randomly called on. But to be honest, I can't really give too much detail on the class' response because I felt less in touch with the classroom environment when I was cold-calling. Part of the problem was just physical/logistical. In juggling a dry-erase marker, a sheet of notes, and a stack of cards with names on them, I repeatedly found myself in awkward situations where I wanted to write something on the board and/or glance at my notes and call on someone immediately afterward. Instead, I'd have to put one of the objects down, shuffle the cards, and then pick a name, creating a few moments of silence in which I might lose the class' active attention. This was in no way helped by the fact that--in a strange version of randomness--I drew the same 3 names over and over again.

I'm sure I'll try cold-calling at some point during the school year and I plan on trying out concept tests in another lesson this summer, but this first trial was not encouraging. If cold-calling means I'm less attuned to my students' level of engagement, I'd rather use my own method of quasi-arbitrary questioning. Sure, it opens me up to complaints from the kids who always raise their hands and aren't always called upon, but I think I'd get those anyways.

The most revelatory thing about this experiment was that it drove home how bad my classroom management (and my teaching in general) got toward the end of this week. Awkwardness with cards or not, I shouldn't be getting so flustered or unperceptive that I can't tell how a new technique was received by my students.

On a closely related note, the first student I cold-called for a response to "This Is Just To Say" (Who do you think Williams is writing to?) refused to say anything, until I prodded her a second time, and then declared that "it was a stupid question." Okay, unrepentant trigger-puller-lunch-eater that I am, I wrote her name on the board. She probably deserved to jump straight to one check (a call home) for the severity. As discussion rolled along, students participating more or less and generally not responding as well as I'd hoped, I decided the noise was getting too high and gave a few verbal warnings. Not much lasting effect, so I resolved to take a sacrificial lamb: unfortunately, the first person to talk after this mental resolution was the same girl. Check #1. Needless to say, she didn't like that, said she wasn't talking, and gave me enough lip to earn Check #2. Detention. Hooray.

As sacrificial lamb, she did her part; the room was basically quiet for the rest of the period. But I did feel like I had been a little too arbitray, a little unfair. When I gave her the detention slip after lunch she crumpled it up, may not have even put it in her backpack. Now, the girl most definitely has problems. Anger, etc. She's actually the oldest in the class, 16 and making up 7th grade English. But what I found out after dismissal (and after she got a 2nd detention for cursing me in front of Ms. B) is that she's also taking care of her step-dad (the only man who's ever treated her nicely) because he was shot in the stomach on Tuesday and is refusing to eat unless she makes him and because her mom won't take care of him for some reason. As Ms. B (whom she told all this) told her, all that still doesn't excuse her bad behavior. But golly if it doesn't explain some of it.

We're told to let whatever negativity we receive or whatever negative results we get just slide off our back--our students will forget about it and we'll do better next time. That's going to be a hard attitude to keep, as I don't forgive myself easily. Thankfully, forgiving ourselves doesn't mean we forget why we failed. This week, the axe will fall earlier and with greater consistency. And hopefully, as a result, with less frequency!

Assignment: Focus Paper Response

2006-06-12T19:04:00.000-07:00

My immediate response to Elizabeth Savage’s focus paper on white segregation academies was dismay. She--along with Dave Molina, who also discusses the academies and offers a similar explanation for their longevity--describes the determination of whites in Mississippi to perpetuate segregation by founding and fleeing to private schools that effectively bar blacks from attending. Perhaps the grimmest revelation in Elizabeth’s paper is how much political support these white academies have received. She traces a lineage of state-sponsored organizations that have worked to shore up the legal legitimacy of and public support for these academies, from the Legal Education Advisory Committee that was created soon after the Brown decision, to the State Sovereignty Commission of Gov. James Coleman, to the present-day Council of Conservative Citizens, which counts Trent Lott as an honorary member.

Elizabeth also suggests that these academies are finding support within the public school system. While students in the public schools are overwhelmingly black, the administrators who staff the school boards and district offices are predominantly white. Many of these white administrators send their children to these private academies and—if they thus feel a greater responsibility to these private institutions than the public schools—they are ideally positioned to keep the cost of public education low for the white population, by minimizing school spending (and consequently the income tax).

I’m in no position to agree with or dispute Elizabeth’s claims, since I’ve been here for less than a week and haven’t ventured outside of Oxford except for summer school. But despite my dismay, I don’t doubt that the kind of corruption and entrenched racism she depicts could be the law of the land. The adversity that poor black children in Mississippi are up against seems systemic. I remember using Google maps a few months ago to find the school I’d be teaching at. There are two middle schools in Cleveland, one on the west side of the train tracks, with the Cleveland Country Club and Delta State University, and the other on the east side. It was no surprise to find that I’d be teaching at the one on the east side, that over three-quarters of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, that its average class size is well above the state and district averages, and that 100% of its students are black.

It was sad to hear Ashley and ‘Vette say that their highest goal is to get out of Hollandale and out of the Delta. You’d like to think they could go to college and change their hometown, change the way things work. But I don’t blame them for wanting to leave it all. And I’m at a loss as to how anyone might go about changing something so insidiously backwards and well-supported as this quasi-institutional racism.