The Children's Crusade

New Home

2007-10-21T15:06:00.000-05:00

I just wanted everyone to know that I still write this blog. It moved to the:

http://thechildrenscrusade.vox.com

Most of my posts are for friends only so feel free to add me.

What is the impact that this experience has had on your life?

2007-07-10T02:44:00.000-05:00

I like this question. It is sufficiently broad enough where I could say anything I wanted and it would still fall within the bounds of having answered it.

In one sense, the experience was the equivalent to an earthquake hitting my life. In a short period of time I found myself in a new city that I didn't understand. My only friends were teachers placed in the same area. I was teaching school before I figured out where my bank was and where to get some good Chinese food.

The were a few aspects of the year that were difficult to handle. One was the perpetual feeling of being alone. I never really saw my roommate since she had a life outside of teaching. My friends were all teachers so they were spending their free time doing teaching-related things. THere were a few reprieves, occasional weekends and Wednesday night margaritas at the Mexican restaurant, but they seemed few and far between.

The other aspect that got to me was the lack of of control I felt over my own life. I would be treated like a child by my administrators. I was held hostage my the demands of my job. I would come home each day exhausted and still have 50 things to do for the week. The needs of the parents, students, and administrators (who had to look out for the district) took precedence over my own. At stretches it felt like I didn't matter.

The toughest part of this experience was watching my friends leave the program. Over the course of the year, three of my best friends left. After each one left I had to question why I was still here. Most of them were having the same problems I was but I was still teaching. What was wrong with them? What was wrong with me?

I find that this program has changed how I few poverty. Working in close proximity with students with so little makes one realize how preventable their situation is. It also made me a little hardened. I became more aware of the stakes that each child faced and had to become unemotional or risk feeling sorry for my students instead of pushing them.

The good experiences were surprising in many ways. I honestly didn't expect them to happen at all. When I got my classroom under control, I felt better. When students who I thought had no hope started getting it together, I felt better. When I actually started to like my job despite its awful aspects, I felt better.

The impact teaching has had on my life is more appreciable in the summer. I found that I had changed as a person. I am calmer in public, more accepting of my own numerous flaws, and more willing to be honest to the point of being a little confrontational. I like myself more. I believe I can make it through anything because I survived the fire.

My Performance as a Teacher

2007-06-25T20:51:00.000-05:00

As a teacher, summer school was a major point of reflection. It was a chance to redo all the things I wish I had done better last year. I got a new first day of school. I got a new chance to be consistent on the first day and every day thereafter. I got a new chance to interact with the students in a way that I felt more comfortable.

I was going to be humble but I am just going to say it: my class is reeking of success. The very small environment and the abundance of capable teachers makes it work surprisingly well. My partner and I got control of the class early and created a very strong work ethic. The kids are responding and working hard.

The main areas we honed in on instructionally were the parts of speech (with an emphasis on verb usage). We (particularly the other second year and myself) worked on it early and often. Additionally, the experience we as second-years was reflected in the instruction. We had a ton of resources available and knew what the students needed to know. We also had this seriousness about us that forced the kids to do their work. On the test we gave, the students seem to have picked up things they didn’t know. There is already progress since the pre-test. Whoo!

The area where they were weakest was sentence structure. It is kind of this ambiguous entity. I mainly worked with the rules of subject-verb agreement. It is necessary to give them the rules to frame so many other lessons (particularly simple and compound sentences) that illustrate them in effect. The weakness was the approach. I have yet to figure out the right way to teach all this stuff. All of the content I am teaching relies on other content I am teaching and it is hard to figure out what should go first. Talking about how subjects and verbs agree in statements with phrase is slightly confusing if we haven’t gone over phrases yet. At the same time it would be silly to go over phrases without having fully covered the more basic parts of the sentence, the subject and verb, I never really realized how complex English is until I attempted to teach it.

Procedurally, the instruction was strong. The students were listening and working hard. The assessments that have been given look pretty good. There are a few problems here and there, but nothing that indicates that they aren’t “getting it”. I was lucky enough to be in a classroom environment where I have the luxury of working with other teachers that have different perspectives about the problems that the class is experiencing and the gains that the class is making. With five kids, it is VERY EASY to differentiate instruction. I can simply hand out five different sheets that are suited to the student’s problems. I can pull a kid out while another teacher is providing instruction. It is amazing.

In the future I want to focus more on delivering a cohesive educational product to my students. I want them to engage more with the content. Way too many lessons were teacher-centered and required very little of the students other than to learn and practice proper grammar. The very nature of summer school required us to move from item to item whether or not the students understood the topic fully. If I were doing this again, I would find a way to work on those aspects and make the class a more polished product.

Summer School Goals

2007-06-14T15:36:00.000-05:00

Discuss the learning goals and instructional decisions made during the planning of your lessons.

I am teaching 7th grade English in Mississippi. My work was cut out for me. My partner and I came the planning process assuming that students would be suffering from huge difficulties in the basics. As a result we laid out our lesson plans to emphasize the following areas: grammar, mechanics, and reading comprehension. The overall learning goal of the students was to rapidly get them to pick up those skills on the MCT and the state curriculum. Seeing as that goal was an impossible one to accomplish in two and a half weeks, my partner I am put an increased emphasis on exposure and mastery of a smaller set of skills within the realm of grammar and mechanics. We agreed that mastery of the parts speech is the most important.

The instructional methods we decided upon were going to be as basic as the classroom curriculum. The preferred method of instruction was direct, with a heavy emphasis on taking notes for the first few days (because you can’t do anything with grammar unless you know the rules) followed by the rollout of activities and inductive work that played upon the knowledge.

For the first week especially, we wanted to control the environment. The room had to be an environment where the teacher can easily exert control of everything and everybody. I think that a silent classroom is the most desirable one. I want a place where the students are going to be listening to me by default (no other distractions are available) and where I am the visual centerpiece of the room.

The danger of the approach is that our approach became incredibly centered on the second-years in our group. I think that we became the sheriffs very quickly and that students became dependednt on us to be worked incredibly hard and to have an incredbily tough structure, something that our first-years did not offer out of the gate. I am hoping that after the first week ends, the first-years adapt to our hard standards and our desire to pound the basics into these kids before they walk out of the door, something they both need and deserve.

Quitting

2007-06-13T22:56:00.000-05:00

One of my three best friends in MTC is quitting the program. I feel this combination of sadness and anger aimed at about 10 different directions, including the program itself. Unlike the last two times my friends have left the program, I don't feel jealous. I think that is progress.

This has been an awful week. I am tired. Summer school sucks. The only thing that is going OK is the teaching, mainly because the kids are awesome. The adults are less so.

There is a chance that I will be known this week by my Indian name, "boy that can't stop crying".

A Note to the New Blood

2007-06-09T03:44:00.001-05:00

I am no longer a first-year teacher. I knew that for a few days (the contract only ended on May 30) but it didn't become clear until the new first-years arrived on the scene. They reminded me how idealistic and open-minded I was before I entered my own classroom. Let's just say I have changed a bit since the time my video was recorded.

I could see them nervously shifting during the video. I notice that because I did the same thing one year ago. Now, I rarely seem to shift around when people are focused on me. My handshake has gotten stiffer and more prone to do any one of the 20 shakes my students have with me. I move around less and notice such movement in others. I know when people are giving me their full and undivided attention and only use it to my advantage during the rare moments I actually have something important to say.

In short, this year has turned my idealism into realism. It has turned nervous energy into focused, mechanical behavior the moment I step inside the school building.

It is disturbing that in conversations, I become the experienced one. I am sharing stories but at some level I still have no idea what I am doing at any given moment.

The biggest problem I am having is not coming off as too negative when I have casual conversations with first-years. When I describe my experience in the classroom, it comes out horribly. I talk about the problems I faced on a daily basis and the situation in the school that forced me to leave.

If any first-years are actually reading this (and know who I am), I need to assure you that this experience has a high for every low. It is just that the highs are harder to put into words. The feeling of a child that has not done a thing coming around is a high. The feeling you get when a student tells you that they "get it" is a high. The feeling when a class previously in chaos is now in order is a high. The feeling that you are clicking on all cylinders in the midst of chaos is a high. The feeling that you are part of changing a child's life, just one of out the maybe 130 or more you will teach, is an overwhelming high.

You don't get to feel those highs right away. You will, in all likelihood, slave away at least one semester before you start reaping the smallest of rewards. For me the reward was respect. It was one of my students getting their business together. It was kids picking my brain after school about life decisions. It was the moment where I could entertain the possibility that I was not wasting my life away trudging as an unappreciated idiot.

The biggest highs in some ways were bittersweet. I got some of the best compliments when I told students I was leaving. I almost cried during the last week of school because I was losing my children. That is something you might not see coming but in time it will.

Teaching is both the most painful, wretched jobs in the world and one of the greatest.

What you will find is that nobody in your school building will say "thank you for doing a good job" for a really long time.

I would like to take a moment to thank you.

Thank you for coming to Mississippi. It was a huge gamble to move across the country to do something you have never done before and then be expected to do it well.

Thank you for working in some of the nation's worst schools.

Thank you for helping us teach summer school.

Thank you for helping to change the world.

Five Pieces of Advice

2007-06-01T10:40:00.000-05:00

After a year of teaching, I have many lessons to offer. I summed up what I know into five points. These are very broad lessons that are more useful to expectation setting than anything else. At a later point this summer I will be offering more useful day-to-day advice for the new teacher.

That having been said, this is what I know and what I found out.

1) You can lead a horse to water...

I was going to put this last since it is the most important but I don't want anyone to miss out on this piece of wisdom that becomes your life as a teacher.

You can razzle and dazzle them all-day with your lessons but little Johnny still has to be woken up five times during class. It is sometimes hard to concede that some kids don't care about your class. Most of them have particularly daunting issues at home and could not care less about the rules of subject-verb agreement.

There are just going to be kids you can't reach. There are going to be parents who can't grasp that their child is anything other than perfect. There are going to be administrators that won't listen. There are going to be situations that make you want to beat your head into the wall.

I might get attacked for this one, but I honestly believe that sometimes the best thing a teacher can do is teach the students that want to be taught and hope that you can spark interest in others as the year goes on. I won't let students who don't care disrupt my lesson, but at the same time I have to prioritize my time and resources.

You need to decide very early in the year how much of a coach/motivator teacher you can be without burning out. If operating at that level doesn't reach all your students by the time May rolls around, know that you did all you could and move on.

2) Communication is key to everything that happens in that classroom

Make sure students know what they should be doing at every moment of your class. That means you should know what classroom environment you want, make rules and procedures to create that classroom, and then TELL THE KIDS. If a kid is talking because he had no idea that he needed to be doing a "do now", that is partially your fault as a teacher. Saying it once is not enough, make sure that it is clear. I suggest giving students a test on rules and procedures during the first two weeks of school.

My failure this year was not communicating well enough about procedures. It led to needless confusion and many problems. I eventually had to stop teaching and go over them again in the middle of the year. Magically, many management problems disappeared. You should avoid my mistake and do it right the first time.

3) Protect Yourself

This one is short because it is so straightforward.

Document everything that comes your way. Build a system for keeping track of behavioral problems and consequences. Keep track of who needs rewards. have a system for making sure all parents get called during the first two weeks of school and then having their numbers in one place in case future contact is needed.

You don't actually need to completely organized as long you appear to be. You just need to know where everything is and be able to find it in about 30 seconds. I functioned using six clipboards and about five massive stacks of papers. I knew what I was doing and where everything was and nobody knew how chaotic things actually were.

4) Never allow your integrity to be questioned

You are the moral leader of the classroom. Always use that power for good. If you are consistently implementing fair rules and procedures, you are over halfway there.

As an extension of that idea, ALWAYS DO THE RIGHT THING!!!

I would like to add the following observations about passing classes. Most of the schools with MTC teaches are those where students get used to be passed on to the next grade regardless of their performance. I beg you not to be one of those teachers that moves on warm bodies to the next course. Teachers with integrity make it clear that passing is based on academic performance only.

Don't pass students for the following reasons:
- You like them
- You feel bad for them
- You don't want to see them next year

Students learn that hard work doesn't matter and that they can do whatever they want and get away with it. Make a stand against this. If you expect more, you will get some more. If you stand up, maybe other teachers will take notice.

It isn't easy to do the right thing. I have been forced into meetings with my administrators because too many students were failing my class. Stand up to up to them. It won't be hard if you are right. As long as you are respectful and conscious of your situation, you will know how to pick your battles. In m heart, grades are the battle I will fight. They were the ditch I picked to die. Anyway, fight for what is right.If you don't, you will be seen as weak. I'll go more into that with lesson five.

If you do the wrong thing, it will usually catch up to you. It will almost always catch up to your students. If nothing else you will feel guilty about it for a long time.

5) It is your classroom. You are always right.

If you are properly implementing lesson four, stand by it. Be adamant about everything you are doing, will do, and have done. Parents might complain but tell them your decisions are final.

Let's get this straight. You won't actually be right 100 percent of the time. For the first few weeks you might be wrong more than your are right. It doesn't actually matter. Stand by your wrongness while simultaneously learning from it.

For example, if you thought you heard profanity in the back of the room and give a student a consequence accordingly, stand by it. If the kid protests that he said something else, ignore it. Even if other student(s) claim credit, leave the initial consequence alone. If you desire, give consequences to the other student(s). If parents makes it an issue, tell them what you heard and the consequence. End it there. If the administration brings it into questions, do the same thing. Don't start doubting yourself. Don't change your mind. If you do, it will lead to bigger and more dramatic failures.

If you concede mistakes others, they will sense weakness. It's like blood in the water. The sharks will close in. If you work at a bad school, administrators will prey on you. If there are problem students, they will become emboldened. Depending on the circumstances, parents will jump in and attack, often with administrative backing. I can't say this enough. DON'T LOOK WEAK!!! DON'T EVER PUT YOURSELF IN A SITUATION WHERE YOU ALLOW YOURSELF TO SCRUTINIZED!!!

Last Day of School

2007-05-25T23:27:00.000-05:00

I thought the last day of school would be happier. I have been looking forward to it for a really long time. It represented the end of planning, grading, managing "challenging" students, and having to deal with the rampant idiocy surrounding me. Instead it came as a bit of a letdown and was for more introspective than celebratory.

During our "staff celebration" today, my principal publicly handed out pens to the teachers who were leaving my school this year. This group of teachers includes the vast majority of the bright and innovative ones under age 30. When she got to me, she announced that I had made it through a difficult year.

I don't like that description as the be all and end all.

My year had many difficulties (the majority being the fault of my administration) but it was not difficult in its entirely. There are many good things that happened this past year. I made meaningful personal connections with most of my students. I continually learned how to be a better teacher. I made the transition from bad teacher to decent teacher. I learned things about myself that I could never get anywhere else. I learned from my students. I learned from my failures. I sometimes even learned from grad school.

This year was difficult. But it was not only difficult. That's all I am saying.

The thing that got me was how my students responded to my announcement that I was leaving and moving to another district. I expected them to be happy. I expected a few students to think they drove me out of the school, which is so not the case. That did happen to some extent but it was rare.

The reactions were far different than expected.

Many of my students were saddened and/or angered by my decision to leave. That was surprising. I didn't they cared what happened to me.

The reaction that got me most was the resigned acceptance shown by the majority. They were saddened but not enough to get themselves worked up over it. These were the kids who on the last day wrote down all the names of the teachers who were leaving and didn't seem fazed when the number was solidly in the double-digits. They knew the massive teacher turnover in their school was normal. They know their school is a crappy place to work, especially for those with other, often more lucrative or academically stimulating, options in front of them. They know that their teachers are fleeing to other districts. They see the stream of their most talented teachers walking out the door, alienated and angry, and just suck it up.

I know that I made the right decision. I had to leave to save my mind. I can't handle another year here if things continue as they are and under the constant, condescending pressure I was under. I wish my school could be run better. I wish I could stay. It's not my choice.

It breaks my heart.

I need to relax. Summer school starts in a little over two weeks and I need to be rested up. I need some more kids to get attached to.

Changes

2007-04-30T22:53:00.001-05:00

Teaching has changed me.

I don't just mean in this socially conscious way. Going in front of a room full of students from some of the worst backgrounds in America makes you think and act differently.

Teaching has such a huge impact on you as person because the job is seemingly never-ending. It is in many ways a social position. I am a teacher at school. I am a teacher at home grading. I am a teacher at the grocery store where students work. I am a teacher when running and I get stopped by students. I am a teacher when parents call me when I am trying to cook dinner. I am a teacher every moment. I am thinking about teaching, planning to teach, reflecting on what I taught, or being reminded that I teach all the time. It sometimes gets to the point where I have to restrain myself from disciplining random teenagers I see at the store or the mall for having cell phones or talking too loudly.

Because of this intermingling of the job and your personhood, the issues of students become those of your own. Poverty goes from being this distant thing to close event as you witness it through the lives of students. After a while I got a little hardened to the little tragedies of everyday life. If I didn't get the slightest bit callous to their condition, I would have allowed them to use poverty as an excuse to fail. Everything they do, from the food they eat to the clothes on their back to the decisions that they make, is informed by that cycle of poverty.

One of the most striking aspects of teaching is the impact it has had on my personality. The big change is the decline of the "nice guy" persona. I am not afraid to say "no to anyone if I am confident in my decision. That has led to a more productively (for the most part) confrontational attitude.

I don't take nearly as much crap from people as I did in August. The aspect that fueled this change is the fact that students and administrators perceive niceness as weakness. Don't even get me started on how foreign and idiotic that is to me. Niceness was the key difficulty I had in dealing with people. I had to kill that perception by being consistently vigilant in my views (and smiling while doing it). Late work is late work. Bad work is bad work. Dumb policy is dumb policy. If it served a productive purpose to say the truth (often not the case with my administration), I started saying it.

I find myself becoming far more confident of myself as a person. I don't care if my belt is out of a loop or if I speak oddly. I have been tested as a person for so long by so many people that I no longer cared what they thought about me. I know who I am.

Teaching is the hardest job I could imagine having. It has cost me time, energy, and mental stability. It probably has taken a little time off my life. It also offers a few moments of immense rewards. If it doesn't change you, there is a problem. Hopefully you change for the better.

The State Test

2007-04-17T20:15:00.000-05:00

A big, big bunch of you future MTC teachers out there should get used to the following four words: Subject Area Testing Program. If you are doomed to have those words associated with your preps, they will make you a life a little more challenging. It seems that for some reason that new teachers, especially the MTC variety of new teachers, have a high likelihood of being placed in one of the state tested subjects: Algebra I, Biology I, English II, and US History from 1877 to Present. It is likely some combination of the following factors:

1) Nobody wants to teach them
2) It is easier to blame an outsider if things don't work out
3) You will be one of the most competent teachers at your school

The results of the test are used to rank the school. Most of the schools that you will be at suck on some level (or else they wouldn't need you). For that reason you will be under immense pressure to raise scores quickly.

Let me repeat.

THERE IS A LOT OF PRESSURE.

The pressure won't kill you. You just need to be prepared for it.

You will find your administration doing things that might seem to be unethical to people with a shred of integrity. For example, my school purged the rosters of SATP classes. Any students they thought would fail were moved to other classes until the next year. That is one of the many things that may or may not happen next year. In my view, it is best not to fight it.

I teach English II. I get leaned on all the time to achieve the "bold targets" (that would require us to triple our proficiency levels in one year) and to meet the "adequate yearly progress" goals of No Child Left Behind. For some reason I have to make up for over a decade of inadequate education in one year.

The biggest problem for me was the spotlight my administration put on me. I had a lot of developing to do as a teacher and it sucked to have people leaning on me all the time to generate results. The spotlight continually grows as the testing date draws near (only one week away). I increasingly lose my autonomy to teach as I desire as random people tell me what I should be doing at any given moment. My principal pulled me into a meeting two weeks ago and told my class to stop reading a novel because it wouldn't be on the test.

There is also some upside. I found that the SATP teachers get almost anything they need if it helps them raise scores. I have also found that with all the constant assessments and data mining that it is easier to see measurable improvement in your students (at least the ones who will do the work).

You can improve test scores if you do nothing other than getting the kids to answer all the questions and to actually try. If you teach them some grammar and what good writing looks like, you might be looking at some measurable gains. Just don't expect miracles to happen left and right. Progress is all that matters

As much as the testing regime bothers me, I guess I really haven't learned my lesson (or I might just like the challenge). I am changing from one SATP subject (English II) to another (US History from 1877 to Present) next year. I am excited.

If any of you all need some English II materials/strategies/prayers, I should have a ton.

What should I know about MTC before I arrive in June?

2007-04-01T22:45:00.000-05:00

What should I know about MTC before I arrive in June?

That's a good question for the future first-years who read this thing.

Mississippi is a pretty interesting place.

I have to start off with the food. It is pretty amazing, especially for people like me who tend to ignore nutrition. You can have all the fried foods you want. Macaroni & cheese is a vegatable here. There is also the terribly disgusting foods. For some reason Kool-Aid pickles are prominent in my head. You will also have to get used to the presence of perhaps the most disgusting food in the world, "Flamin' Hot Cheetos". I swear that my students are in love with them despite my lectures and obvious dismay.

Mississippi is actually quite a beautiful place. There is a strange charm to the Delta that makes you want to stay for a while (since I don't live there). I have found that Jackson is surprisingly cosmopolitan if you look in the right corners. It's not quite New York (or even a New Orleans) but it is something.

There are going to be a lot of annoying people here. Ole Miss has a lot of those people. The kind of girls that put makeup on to go jogging and guys in polo shirts with awful hair. If I see one more "Southern Boy" haircut I am going to grab some scissors and cut off those bangs. Grown men should not have bangs.

More seriously, you can't talk about Mississippi without talking about race and by direct extension, poverty. It is surreal to what level race is the unspoken backdrop to conversations here. You will be working in some of the most segregated areas of the state. You will find that Jackson is surprisingly segregated. You will find that the Delta is more often than not, disgustingly segregated. The school districts become showcases for what happens when half of the community (the white half) doesn't support the schools and the other half (the black half) doesn't seem to know what to do.

On a more practical level here is some advice.

Enjoy your senior year of college (or whatever you are doing right now). It's fun on its own and you need to get rested up for the year. There is a good chance that once you step foot in Mississippi that you are not getting any significant amount of time off. Sorry. I graduated from college on Sunday afternoon and ended up in Oxford on Tuesday morning. After June and summer school came July and TEAM. After that last week, I had a week of district induction. Then school begins. Then somehow your body makes it to Thanksgiving Break. It is painful but that is life.

Don't stress out.

Repeat.

Don't stress out.

We (the future second-years and the MTC staff) will take care of you. We are going through the experience right now. We will give you any wisdom you need that happens to fall our way. We will give you any hugs and support you need. Things will be OK. Trust me. Now take your PRAXIS II and get away from the computer.

Why You Should Come to Mississippi

2007-03-01T19:43:00.000-06:00

Mr. Guest has asked us to write about the pros and cons of joining the Mississippi Teacher Corps so the next generation of teachers has something to consider. This has prompted me to really think about why I became a teacher and whether others should follow down this path I am almost halfway down. Before I comment on that question, I should share my mental state so that you all will know where I am coming from.

I can say with certainty that February was less than optimal. It sucked. It was better than October (the month I was ready to quit and go home) only because I had enough perspective and rationality to slug it out. I am slightly at odds with my administration and feel strongly that I will leave my school at the end of the year. So I'm not in a great mood right now. That having been said, I am going to attempt to step back and talk about the MTC.

A little over a year ago (February 15, 2006 to be exact) I aggreed to join the MTC after thinking about it for about three months. I did it for a lot of reasons. I was looking for something to do before I went to law school. I was looking to make a difference. I was looking to go back to the South. I was looking to interact with people that I woudl never otherwise get to meet. I was looking to understand how public schools worked in America and how we can fix them. To be honest, the master's degree was of little interest to me. For the most part they were good reasons and my heart was in the right place.

There are only a few possible bad reasons to join. Don't join because you need a job--being unemployed or moving back home is far less stressful than teaching. Don't join if you don't like kids. Don't join because others want you to. You need to want this.

Other than that, I don't think there are that many bad reasons to join MTC. Even if you are killing time before grad school or something along those lines, you can find yourself enjoying teaching and making a positive impact. There is nothing wrong with teaching for two years and then deciding whether you want to continue in the field or continue on some other path. You will be a far better person for having done it and should you enter public policy will be able to be a knowledgeable voice for the children without one.

If you have a good heart, a good work ethic, and a good sense of humor, then you will find a way to become a good teacher. If you are not afraid of failing, so much the better. Being a first-year teacher, you will fail all the time in big and little ways. The question is what you will do after failure. If you are going to get up and try it again, then this is for you. If you are one to give up easily, there is probably a consulting job waiting for you.

For every amazing lesson (my lesson on irony is still talked about months later) there are a few flops. For every child that you get through to, there is another that breaks your heart. For example, one of my best students just got off probation on Monday and then got into fight in the hallway on Tuesday on the way to my class. For every child that wants to learn, there are several that came to school for the lunch. This past week I have been cussed out during class by four different students. It stings. I have also developed great relationships with students that I feared were lost causes in September and October. That is pretty sweet. You come to work each day to endure the bitter in pursuit of that sweetness.

So even though I am having a bit of hard time right now, I know that it will pass when I finally get a bit of rest and get everything together. I know that I can't imagine myself being anywhere else right now. I know that I will finish the program because I would hate myself if I didn't.

Should I stay or should I go?

2007-02-19T21:46:00.000-06:00

Now that I am almost through the third term I find myself wondering what I am going to do next year. I am going to stay in MTC. I am 95% sure of that. I am an acceptable to good teacher and I am getting better at it as I learn new things. I like the environment, the children, and the ability to connect with people that I otherwise would have never encountered. Yet I find myself weighed down with a lot concern about my next course of action.

The question I constantly ask myself is whether I am going to stay at my school or take a stab getting a teaching position elsewhere. I am getting tired of not being treated like a professional by my administration. I am tired of being criticized in front of other teachers for doing things I was told to do. I am tired of having my planning periods taken away by dumb meetings and professional development that now takes even some of my Saturdays away from me. I am tired of being talked to like I am a child. I am tired of being told that I am a bad classroom manager for sending loud and disruptive children out of my room so that I can teach the others. I am tired of being suffocated in bureaucracy and witnessing the massive misallocation of resources that happens in my district.

Most importantly I am tired of being treated like I am not important. I get the impression that I am replaceable and perhaps will be replaced. That feeling sucks.

The only thing that keeps me where I am are the children. I love them to death, even the ones that play with my last nerve. At least they have an excuse for being messed up. I know that my students need me more than those kids in the suburbs. They have never met a teacher like me and I don't think some of them ever will.

I don't want them to think I walked away from them because the going got hard. That is not the lesson I want to teach them.

The point is that I am seriously thinking about going to a place where even one of those aforementioned factors are improved. I just want to be respected.

I can't decide what to do.

January

2007-02-03T22:48:00.000-06:00

I decided to turn this monthly post into sort of a status update on my teaching career (for those who are following).

I think I am starting to enjoy teaching. Last semester, I worked really, really hard and didn't get much out of it. For the bulk of the time I was always behind on grading, I rarely made parental calls, I didn't sleep well at night because I was either working or thinking about the next thing that had to be done.

The biggest change is that I've chilled out a lot. I've accepted that some things will never happen. For example, I will never make some people in my building happy. I'm OK with that. I realized that I was not responsible for making my kids be responsible--for brining their books, homework, and supplies to class. I could only offer rewards and consequences. Carrying the whole world on my back is not my responsibility.

The big leap for me was finally controlling things I could control. For example, I try to plan lessons out two weeks in advance (one prep is already planned until Spring Break) and I grade papers as soon as I get them. It is so easy to get behind and I am working hard not to fall into trap. In my classroom, I make an effort to make every second of time count--building on my efficiency from last semester.

My class management is not the best but it is getting better. I have more rewards (tickets are the greatest things ever) and I am making a conscious effort to be more consistent.

The glaring weak spot seems to be my personal life (or lack thereof). At some point I will make my life be about something more than teaching and talking to my friends (almost all of whom are teachers) about teaching. I'm kind of hoping that this situation resolves itself.

Here's hoping that I can build on January's progress in February.

Martin Luther King Day

2007-01-15T10:31:00.000-06:00

"I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the last 50 years, Mississippi has made huge strides towards achieving racial equality. I live in a state without segregation, lynchings, and political violence. Civil and voting rights are preserved to the letter of the law. The bulk of Mississippi's African-American population is represented by an African-American U.S. Representative. About a third of the seats in the state House of Representatives are held by African-Americans.

Yet the states still swelters with injustice. Widespread poverty, especially on the Delta and to a lesser extent in Jackson, disproportionately has a darker face. African-Americans still face limited educational opportunities and as a result limited life opportunities. If one walks the hallways of my school, you would find a 97% African-American student body that is receiving an inferior education compared to a mostly white high school minutes away and on other side of the city limits. Our building is worse, our teachers tend to be less qualified, and there seems to be a pervasive sense of failure among significant chunks of the student body. It's like they've given up before they walked through the door.

It's my job to give my students the same opportunity as their white counterparts. It is something that I'm not sure if I can actually do. I have failed consistently to be the amazing teacher they need me to be. I find myself making huge mistakes and learning important things on the job. But I have to try. You can't change the world by sitting on your butt. More importantly, I can't help them to change their world by sitting on my butt.

So I'm going to quote another prominent African-American, Jesse Jackson, to finish off this posting:

"Suffering breeds character. Character breeds faith, and in the end faith will not disappoint. Our time has come. Our faith, hope and dreams have prevailed. Our time has come. Weeping has endured for nights but that joy cometh in the morning."

I believe that Mississippi can be a better place. So let's suffer for it together. Maybe the bright morning will come sooner than we think and that oasis is not too far away.

One Semester Down

2006-12-07T20:27:00.001-06:00

How did I make it here?

I’m a teacher. I’m a real teacher. I’m the one who lectures, guides, and entertains. I’m the one who gives out homework (and rarely gets it back). I’m the one who keeps up with grades on an almost religious level, calls parents, gives tutorial every day of the week (thank goodness cross country season is over), and usually end each day more drained than the one before. I am suddenly a young old man.

I remember being a college student not so long ago. I remember being “happy and carefree”, a memory that is probably more constructed than real. I remember coming to Mississippi chocked full of naïve idealism. I can’t believe that guy survived the moment reality hit him like a ton of bricks.

I confront so much each day. I have children with severe issues (aside from their poverty and a total lack of self-control). I have a school district and administration with SEVERE ISSUES. I battle with useless paperwork, pacing guides from hell, and learning walks that continually put me on the hot seat. Way too many of my girls are pregnant or have a baby or two at home. Others are getting into random fights over nothing. Others have some issues with drugs, drinking, and law enforcement. One ran kid away from home. Another is dealing with the death of a parent and responded by cussing me out when I (not knowing the situation) asked her to put her book on the shelf. Despite my best work, my classroom is at times feels borderline chaotic and I still spend way too much time on classroom management.

I really wanted to walk away so many times. Any sane person would have done it.

Yet I didn’t. It appears to have made all the difference.

For the longest time (probably the end of September and the entire month of October) I had the firm belief that teaching was killing both my body and soul. I was tired, overworked, frustrated, failing, and everybody at my school went out of their way to pour salt on the wounds. I got sick twice and cried in my classroom.

Why have stayed?

I stayed because I love my children. I stayed because I like enough of them to get through this. I stayed because during that crappy time I still couldn’t tell my kids that I was giving up. I couldn’t be a quitter. I couldn’t be that guy who walked away.

It’s funny that I spend more time learning than teaching. I am constantly trying to figure out what is going on in the heads of 120 kids and trying to steer them in the right direction. I am learning better ways to manage, better ways to teach, and better ways to preserve my sanity.

I like most of my kids. I like that I am starting to get through to some of the most hardheaded people I have ever met with a combination of compliments, rewards, and smiles. I like it when children come in during my planning period or come in after school looking for a quiet place to work.

I am getting more comfortable each day.

I’m finding my niche. I’m the fairly nice, goofy, misbegotten teacher who occasionally manages to cram lesson through all the chaos and baggage that my children bring into the room. I know a lot of people think they are taking advantage of me. I know now that I am getting more from them than I could have ever imagined.

I am hoping this body and soul of mine will make it three more semesters. I can handle a few more ups and downs. Hopefully none of them will break my heart too badly. Maybe a few of them will make me proud. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens.

Consistency, Consistency, Consistency

2006-11-17T21:40:00.000-06:00

It's my biggest weakness.

For the first few weeks of school, my classroom management was extremely haphazard. I didn't really notice as I was doing it, but I was being inconsistent, indecisive, and ran my classroom with too much emotion. As I settled in and realized that chaos was surrounding me, action had to be taken. After revising the rules and procedures (mentioned in previous post), I had to change my way of approaching things because they clearly weren't working. B.G. made the challlenge to enforce the rules and consequences in one class. It's a great (and incredibly difficult) challenge. Yet I had to do better.

I've had to focus on three things in all my classes:

1) When I say things, they happen.
2) Not explaining myself
3) Using the rules and consequences (DUH!!!)

The focal point of this work was going to be my fourth and fifth block classes. By far, these were the most challenging groups I had to deal with. I went out of my way to do all of the aforementioned. When I say raise your hand, I mean it. When I say no bathroom passes, I mean it (even for the kid who later squirms in his seat). I gave out a ton of detentions and office referrals. I let them know that if they aren't interested in receiving an education and choose to interrupt the education of others, that I would be more than happy for them to spend their time on the other side of my door.

A few weeks later these classes are still challenging. Yet I sense changes (since change appears to be slow and painful). We are moving back from chaos to borderline manageability. More work is getting done. Less time is being wasted. Most importantly I feel a little less like a failure.

Classroom Management Redux

2006-11-10T22:33:00.000-06:00

I have somehow survived 14 weeks of school. I've taught about 10 units about everything from pronouns to irony to civil rights. I've been cursed at, insulted, and made to feel like dirt. I've also had incredible, unspeakable highs where I honestly believed that life could not get any better. For the most part I fall in between, feeling decent while constantly exhausted.

Overall, I feel like I am learning more than my children. My students had over a decade of experience at being students of questionable ability. I was a rookie at teaching. I came with my idealism and a classroom management plan that reflected it. As time flew by I threw the idealism out the window, fixed the massive failures of management system, and began working within the reality of my high school.

For the most part, the plans of idealism worked in my room as far as procedures were concerned. The glaring error of my rules and consequence system outweighed the joy I felt at the success of those procedures.

The rules were the first to be thrown out. This summer they were the following: respect, responsibility, and honesty. They sounded really good when I was in Oxford. Down in Jackson, they led to chaos as an inexperienced teacher attempted to enforce very broad rules. I'm sure they work for some teachers but these kids needed some specific rules that I could specifically enforce.

The new ones are:
1) Raise your hand to speak
2) Only one person speaks at a time
3) Come to class prepared
4) Ask for permission to leave seat
5) Students may not chew gum or eat food

I find them to be much easier to enforce and have enabled me to be far more consistent in their implementation.

I also changed my consequences. There were many steps before the fall and it seemed like a good idea. Instead, there were too many steps before an office referral. More importantly there were too many steps before I felt OK sending a student to the office.

The new consequences are:
1) Warning
2) Detention (length determined by teacher)
3) Office referral

Changing the rules has enabled me to cut straight to the chase: poor behavior will not be tolerated. I don't care if they spend more time outside my room than inside it. Until they act in an acceptable way, you will not be a member of this class.

As far as other matters are concerned, I have generally preserved the structure I envisioned this summer. A few of my envisioned procedures (tardy, greeting students at door) have been superseded by school policy. Others (late work, homework, entering the classroom) have gone as planned. There are a few things that I never really envisioned as issues (killing time during long testing periods, "learning walks", accommodating pregnant students) that I had to sort of make up as I went along and just pretend to my students that it was planned this was the entire time. God forbid they think I am incompetent as I think I am.

I think this whole learning how to manage a classroom this is very much a trial by error sort of thing. I failed at it badly for at least six or seven weeks until I finally started figuring out what worked for me and consistently made it happen. Change is slow but if I make it, part of me suspects that I might actually enjoy the majority of the time spent in my classroom.

Learning Styles

2006-10-14T02:51:00.000-05:00

I finally got around to giving my students a real learning styles inventory (as opposed to the very brief one I gave the first week). The data that came from this one inventory was obviously far more detailed and thus more useful to me. Also the fact it came in October actually made it more useful to me as opposed to something given in August which would have been ignored by the overwhelmed first-year teacher.

That explanation aside, I found the data to be interesting. Overall the classes broke down fairly similarly in terms their learning styles. The vast majority of my students are auditory or visual learners with a few tactile learners in each class.

I have been making some effort to accomodate different learning types. I now always play the audio version of a story so that auditory learners can follow along more easily. I try to keep interesting visuals (i.e. Powerpoints, word walls, and posters) to encourage learning. My biggest trouble has come with making my classroom more hospitable to tactile learners.

I want integrate more kinestic activities into my classroom. As soon as I feel more comfortable with more than one student out of their seat at a time, I want to have more activities involving movement, acting, et cetera. I am also thinking about having an in-class project.

Overall I feel like my ability to meet the needs of all my students will improve throughout the year as I find my bearings, get ideas from other teachers, and settle down a bit. I feel OK with where I am now but know there is a lot of room for growth.

Patience

2006-10-10T20:28:00.000-05:00

I don't have much to write. It's been another long day but those are par for the course. When I get stressed out, I read poetry. This one has been sitting on my desk for a while.

Kay Ryan – Patience

Patience is
wider than one
once envisioned,
with ribbons
of rivers
and distant
ranges and
tasks undertaken
and finished
with modest
relish by
natives in their
native dress.
Who would
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable —
a place with
its own harvests.
Or that in
time's fullness
the diamonds
of patience
couldn't be
distinguished
from the genuine
in brilliance
or hardness.

October is the Cruelest Month

2006-10-03T15:12:00.000-05:00

I get told that October is the worst month. That scares the crap out of me.

So far in September I have fallen on my face (figuratively), had the worst day thus far and ended up crying in my classroom at the end of the day, took my first personal day (and it was amazing), kicked more students out of my room than I can remember, and still suck at my job (and everyone knows it).

I started off October by teaching sick. I kept sitting down because I got too dizzy to stand. I was coughing and sneezing the whole time. My classroom management suffered and it hit the fan when the administration sent five kids I had kicked out back into my class during fourth block with no explanation. It was the worst experience ever. Today, on day two of the October experience, I called in sick. I think I earned a day off, especially since I am still sick.

If my health was the only concern I was having right now, I think I could deal with that. The worst feeling (one that contributes to the stress that makes me sick) is that I feel lonely all the time I'm at home not teaching. I miss all my friends (from both college and from high school in GA) and my family in SC. This whole lack of friends (particularly those who aren't teachers) thing (especially with my roommate dating all the time) is wearing me down. I spend my days alone, my weekends alone, and a lot more time alone. I hate alone. I hate it far more than teaching a room full of disrespectful kids.

I didn't write this all to say what a horrible experience I am having. All and all, it is a positive one in my personal development. I have learned a lot about myself as a person by being in that classroom and making those rookie mistakes. I love my students, even the ones who make me want to pull my hair out. My administration is fairly good. The support I get is occasionally useful.

I wouldn't trade August and September for anything. If I had the chance, I would do them over again but that is beside the point.

It is just that I honestly don't know how I am going to make it through the month of October. I know that just need to put my head down, suck it up, and teach my way through it. At the same time, if things stay this stressful and isolating I will simply fall apart.

At the end of yesterday one of my students (a 12th grader in 10th grade English who is consistently on the other side of my door for being disruptive), took time out during the middle of class to blame me for not teaching him what he needed to know (even though I did present the content and went over it). It like I was the one who asked him to ignore me. It still hit home and I almost cried in front of the class. I seriously need to stop being an emotional basketcase.

One of my friends in teacher corps left already. A part of me is jealous. At least she is free from this crap.

It seems harder and harder to go school each day. I wish somebody gave a damn.

Poverty

2006-09-15T18:06:00.000-05:00

Is poverty curable in the classroom?

This is one of the big issues introduced in the book "A Framework for Understanding Poverty" by Ruby Payne. After explaining the social differences between the poor, the wealthy, and the beloved middle class she goes on to explain how teachers (presumably from the middle class) should cope with such issues in the classroom (which I have seen way too many of and will probably hit on in many future blog posts).

Beyond that explanation of social class (which I have problems with), the big point she seems to be getting at is that if we teach our children "middle class values" that they will become middle class. If this is not the case, the only other reasons I can think of for teaching "them" "our" values would be to:

1) We want to make students more controllable
2) We see our lifestyles as the only ones in which success and happiness can occur

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that American poverty is good. I think is disgusting. But at the same time I don't think it is necessarily a world outlook. It is often the result of huge structural factors (racism, economic displacement, et cetera) and it is often not accidental. In a contemporary sense it is not necessarily accidental either.

She does end on a point that I can agree with: all children (and people in general) should be given the option to embrace middle class values. As a teacher I will try to implement some of her suggestions for no other reason than give some of my students that choice. I will be a resource to those who want it. At the same time I'm not fooling myself into believing that these values will save them. The only thing that can get them out of poverty is them, with or without those vales and "hidden rules".

The First Long Day

2006-08-31T20:52:00.000-05:00

During second block, I got a nearly perfect evaluation from my principal.

During fourth block, I had to call in the assistant principal because the class was totally out of control, a kid threw a bag full of some unknown food item across the room, and it broke open, leaving a mess across the entire room. This was in addition to the talking, the disrespect, and the walking around that doesn't seem to be deterred by mere detentions.

I walked out my room at the end of the day at the verge of tears.

I learned a few lessons.

1) I am being an awful teacher.

2) My classroom management suffers when I am really tired.

3) I need to go back to laying down the law.

4) I need to stay calmer in these situations. Raising my voice wasn't productive.

5) When these situations do occur, I know that I can make it through.

6) Tomorrow is a new day. I need to make it better.

It is ironically on "pay day" that I was reminded that I am not doing this job for the money. I am clearly doing the job because I love these kids (even though they are testing my last nerve) and I am insane.

A New Start

2006-08-17T00:07:00.000-05:00

I am now eight days into my illustrious teaching career and I have a few observations.

The Good
- The students (they don't know it but I actually like them)
- The administration (they actually have my back)
- Cross Country (running is great and so are the kids)

The Bad
- The students (they WEAR ME OUT)
- The bureaucracy (too many layers, too little useful help)
- The school lunch

A day doesn't seem to pass now where I don't give a detention (yesterday I have five detentions in a ten-minute stretch), a student doesn't make fun of my voice (it's not even funny anymore), and students don't seem to be able to do something as simple as remaining quiet for five minutes. They also feel like it is OK to disrespect me because I look young. It seems like each day I have remind them that disrespect will not fly in my classroom.

Thankfully out of the six classes I teach, only two of them consistently generate problems. I never realized the extent to which the students influence my behavior. With the better classes I feel more comfortable cutting up (in an appropriate way) and having more group activities. With my other classes I feel this need to keep control ALL THE TIME to make sure the something gets done.

I have made a few rookie mistakes. I accidentally escalated a confrontation (which I thankfully "won") over something that could have been dealt with quietly. My kids don't think I respect them because I use consequences so liberally for things they think are minor (talking in class and not staying on task).

I also need to be more consistent, especially with my problematic classes. When I give a student a consequence I find myself questioned about what I did for other students. I often just respond by giving the other student in question the same consequence. Really, I should just be more liberal with the consequences until they realize that I actually do mean business.

I have also held my ground as well as I know how. I won't be disrespected in my classroom. If a student makes fun of me they earn the reward of having to spend Friday afternoon with me in detention and doing a copying assignment.

I learned that my seating arrangement sucks and that my seating chart/arrangement needs to be fixed. That will happen this weekend when I have time to think about the optimal solution.

Things could be worse.

Things could be better.

But I'm OK with the way things are for the most part. There's still plenty of fuel in the tank.

Another Video

2006-07-16T01:12:00.000-05:00

Stop pacing!!! For the love of all that is good, stop pacing!!!

This is the only thought that goes through my head I watch myself teach. I think I was actually more nervous teaching my fellow teachers than actual students. It seems apparent, especially since I faced the wrath of the camera on my first day of TEAM.

I also notice myself ending sentences in the middle. My mind will jump from one thought to another in such rapid succession (in case I forget it) that my mouth abandons the earlier thought. It is almost painful to watch.

I am so eager and energetic that it almost sickens me. I so want to impress everyone in the room and I think I went a little overboard. My mind drifted from delivering the lesson I wanted to deliver to getting evaluation points.

In a lot of ways I look worse than the last video. I am clearly uncomfortable with my surroundings, overtly conscious of the time, and not as confident as I should be with the lesson as planned, which is weird because the lesson was pretty good. It would be even better if I worked on tying the whole thing together in a more coherent way and merged in a lesson on similes and metaphors into it (something that will be made possible with a 90-minute block).

I also need to rehearse more. I think a lot of things (set, closure, transitions) would sound more natural if they were practiced. It is something I started doing later in the week and things got way better.

In some ways I am getting better. Despite my presence issues, I felt more prepared than ever. I know what to expect. I am on top of a lot of issues. I actually felt more like a teacher (the tie is so necessary for me to look the part).

It was a pretty harsh reminder that I am very much a work in progress. I am a little scared looking at this going into the fall.

TEAM Teaching

2006-07-13T19:32:00.000-05:00

I guess it has been a while since I did a self-assigned blog. Things have been mildly crazy with that whole learning how to teach thing and dealing with a whole slew of other things happening around me that are all out of my control.

For some reason it surprises me that I still get nervous every time I teach (it just reminds me that Andy Mullins was saying he was supernervous his entire first year--something that terrifies me a little). It scares me that I can't always communicate clearly with my classes. It terrifies me every time I pace the room and potentially distract my students.

TEAM teaching strikes me as mildly ridiculous. Five different teachers all watching me teach to people who already have college diplomas and giving me sometimes contradictory advice. Some teachers think I walk around too much. Others think I don't walk around enough. I don't really care at the end of the day if I always hit all four parts of my set and closure. I don't always care if my transitions are smooth. I don't always care that my assessment is clearly written down in my lesson plan.

I know it matters but right now a lot of things matter more. It matters more that this guy who has never given out a warning (downside of having six amazing summer school students) is somehow going to be able to lay down the law the moment the students walk through my door on August 7. It matters more that I have good content. It matters more that I know what to do when it hits the fan. It matters more that I remain upbeat and positive under pressure.

The whole evaluation thing makes me needlessly tense and often dramatically less confident in my teaching ability. I have all these problems (nervous walking/pacing, talking too fast at times, and my apparent inability to finish a sentence) and I am asked to solve these issues in 40-minute increments in front of people that often don't want to be there. It leads up to me standing in front of the class making myself more nervous, focusing on my problems instead of my content (or the many good things about my teaching style), and typically exacerbating the original problem instead of fixing it.

I don't know if I can be a good teacher until I actually do it. Until I actually am in a room with just my students. I will have to teach a class with no second years in the back, none of my peers in the midst, and nobody there watching my every move and evaluating me.

I know enough now where I can sink or swim. I just want to get the chance to do it. I will probably do a lot more of the former before I can do the latter. I think I can live with that.

The Video

2006-07-01T13:48:00.000-05:00

Watching the video of myself teach was one of the most painful experiences ever. As I watched myself talk about comparative and superlative modifiers with my class I felt a level of angst that compares to few others. For the first few minutes I kept asking myself questions about the spectacle that was unfolding in front of me.

Who was that guy pacing as he was talking about an overhead?

Who was that guy doing random arm motions as he spoke?

Who was that guy who used the words "like" and "ummm" way, way too often?

Who was that guy who used the word "rationale" without even thinking about it?

Who was that nerdy guy who was apologizing to the class for something they probably never noticed?

Could it be me? The moment it hit home was the second time I walked in front of the overhead in a nervous pace and then apologized, lost my train of thought, and took what seemed like an eternity to recover. I was waiting for the moment everyone in the room realized how badly I was doing. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

After 20 minutes of me ripping my teaching apart something happened. My kids were able to tell me what comparatives and superlatives were. They were giving me examples of the rules and what to do with them. I turned off the overhead projector, walked over to the board, and started making up examples. I was going by instinct for the first time that day. My speech slowed down and I was in control of the room.

I looked like a teacher.

I started getting teary-eyed. It was the greatest thing I have ever seen.

Now all I have to do is go from 30 minutes of solid teaching to 90 minutes by the fall. Can it be done? I certainly hope so.

Cooperative Learning and Paper Planes

2006-07-01T13:11:00.000-05:00

I attempted to do both a cooperative learning and paper folding teaching technique in my summer school class. Neither went off as smoothly as I had planned but both taught be about the capabilities of my students and myself as a teacher.

The cooperative learning technique involved the students reading news articles (one from Time Magazine and one from the NY Times). They were broken into groups, with each person having a different role. They were to summarize and talk about the articles within the groups and then each group would teach each other about the article.

That approach fell flat and I could have seen it coming from a mile away. For some reason the kids didn't feel like talking about the article. A lot of them didn't really understand nor care what it was about until I talked about it (thus ruining the whole cooperative thing). The presentations and the group discussion went OK as long as I prodded the whole thing along.

I am thinking it was my fault for picking such hard content for them to work through. It also stalled because the kids weren't really the whole group structure for some reason. They seem to get a lot more out of it when I am the one doing the interacting with them. Part of me suspects they don't have the academic confidence a lot of the time to just read something and tell me their opinions about it.

This is something I am going to have to work on big time. I need to find approachable stuff and do a better job creating a space where conversations/ideas flow freely.

As I mentioned before, I also tried a paper folding activity. It wasn't really out of the book but it was related to the lesson at hand. After we went over following directions and procedures on the MCT I decided to mix it up and have a paper airplane folding. I gave each student a set of directions for a particular type of paper airplen and had them make them. It was pretty fun and for the most part a productive affair. It was a good end of week treat as well.

I don't think I will doing it in the fall since I will have considerably more than six students and control of the room would be tenous at best. It would take a while before I ever feel confident doing such an activity in my class.

Questioning Technique

2006-06-16T20:40:00.000-05:00

OK, I think I am backing off on that whole last post. I am still committed to getting my kids as much education as possible but I am also trying to do it in the most engaging possible way. It is in that way that I used a questioning technique to gauge my fairly aggressive approach to teaching.

There are so many things these kids need to know about the world. They come from bad backgrounds. Most of my kids are over 15. One told me he sold drugs. The vast majorities aren’t getting the parental attention they deserve. They have role models that make me cringe, rappers and athletes whose behavior is often abhorrent. They need to hear something else.

I want them to hear optimism. I want them to hear things that apply to their lives. I want them to learn something about their history, which they seem to be stunningly ignorant of. I also want them to read and write well so that they can out in the world and make something of themselves. It turns out that I can do both at the same time. It may be the case that I have to do both at the same time for either goal to be accomplished.

As a person of color, I have so much more leeway to talk to these kids about race and class and poverty than the majority of teachers in the program that despite their best intentions don’t understand the sting of racism because they never experienced it. I have to talk about the world these kids live in because it seems that very few people are willing to. If I don’t talk about this stuff and give them a positive, optimistic message at the end, who will?

In response to this situation and exploiting the previously stated advantage, I’ve attempted to become a teaching idea machine. I’ve already played rap music in class to introduce ideas (with some success, especially after other teachers in my group gave me ideas to make it better), created extended metaphors between writing structure and a basketball team (not so hot, others could do it better), and attempted to get content that interests them. So far I have been getting better and better at the last one. I may have peaked this week, when I finally got over myself and talked about race and poverty, flat out, through literature and got their attention more than at any other point I have taught them.

Jesse Jackson (as much as he sickens me) gave speeches to the 1984 and 1988 Democratic National Conventions about the plight of the people at the bottom, ones that look quite similar to them. So yesterday I worked through those two speeches with my class. I used to talk about rhyme, repetition, word use, and more importantly to them, its message. THE CLASS ATE IT UP. It was the first time a student complimented my choice of content. James Baldwin wrote about the destructive nature of racism. I worked through one of his writings with the class talking about the exact same things. Although less successful than Jackson, they got the message and hopefully learned some more writing elements. One of the other teachers in my group read Maya Angelou, giving them rich poetry with a message to teach them about rhyme structure.

OK, so the point of this post was to talk about a questioning technique I used. Today, as we talked about James Baldwin, I used cold calling. Since my class has six people, I made multiple index cards for each student and then drew them at random, calling out questions as we were reading. I think it was fairly effective. It allowed me to keep the pace of the class where I wanted it and prevented long, painful silences between me asking a question and somebody volunteering to answer it.

I also gave out index cards to the students at the end of class, asking them to write three questions or comments about the reading and my teaching of it. I found it to be an effective way of gauging comprehension. In this case, all but one of the kids understood the meaning of the reading and enjoyed it, an indicator that I am still engaging them with this content. I also got enough information that will enable me to refine my style of teaching for future classes to maximize comprehension.

I really want to get better at teaching. But I strongly suspect that as long as I am putting forward good content that they are far more likely to walk away with some new knowledge. I will keep asking my students for comments at least once a week, ask for more outside observation, and keep finding things that my students need to hear and will help them both learn English and to survive in the world.

I mean, my class won’t be focused on race or poverty come fall semester. I have much bigger concerns, like keeping control of the room. There will be political things here and there but there is far more to learn. My class will be focused on interesting readings by interesting authors, stuff that the kids will actually want to read. I will attempt to assign engaging papers. So there, I hope to get them to the state standards by being consistently interesting. That is my approach thus far and I will stick to it until either it fails (as perhaps indicated by the question/comment cards) or something better comes along.

First Week of Summer School

2006-06-11T16:38:00.000-05:00

So, I have taught two classes of eighth grade English. It was the first time ever I had stood in front of a group of kids (a whopping six in my class) and attempted to teach them something. I am pretty sure it showed. The first lesson was well planned but I was too nervous to deliver it properly. The second class had a far less engaging lesson plan (as I had them writing for most of the class) but I was better able to deliver it. Despite the weaknesses I was able to keep control of the class during both lessons and get the students to accomplish all the objectives I set out. When looking back I still mostly focus on the weaknesses but I think there were some good things in there. Considering I had never taught a class before, I think I could be doing significantly worse.

There are many things about this summer school teaching that eat me up. I feel a little bad that I am using them to learn how to teach. I feel a little bit bad about the whole summer school thing in general. Group teaching must suck for my students. No one teacher in my group is in charge of the curriculum and I worry that my students are getting a muddled message delivered in six different ways. Even if we were on the same page all the time it our personalities and teaching styles are so different that it would seem to muddle the effectiveness of the overall class. My teaching style in particular is outside the prevailing norm of my group. To me, this seems to be a very ineffective way of teaching.

I worry that I am expecting too much from my students. On my second lesson I clearly went over their heads with not only the vocabulary/terminology I was using but also in the work I want to see from them. I am asking them to do work based on the eighth grade standards when I am skeptical they have even made it to the sixth grade standard. I am not sure if I should just keep going on, explaining the content and my expectations better but sticking to my overall plan since my objectives are being achieved, or if I should just throw the whole thing out, dumb down my future lessons, and make it easier for them. My decision would be significantly easier if I was not being told multiple things from both first and second year teachers.

These kids are not meeting a single state standard for their grade level. Two of my students are 16 years old and still in eighth grade. Yet I am getting conflicting messages, half of which stun me. Are people honestly telling me that the first priority is to make sure the students aren't bored? The idea being that the only way that I can keep these kids interested in school is to be constantly interesting. Are people telling me that being able to read and write well, to be able to understand and express should not be the main focus at this point? SERIOUSLY? To me, the first priority is getting them to the standard, no matter how painful it might be for everyone involved. I know it is impossible to get there in four (now three) weeks but it still should be attempted.

I don't know why I care so much whether or not all my students are being engaged every single moment of my class. I don't think any of my teachers really cared all that much about my interest level as long as I did the work and did well on it, that whole learning thing. School was almost never fun for me. I did it because I had to, because I was expected to. I believe that if you set a high standard, students will tend rise up to it. If they accomplish it, they will feel better about themselves. If they feel better about themselves, maybe they will stick it out and finish their formal educations.

Optimally I would be able to maintain my high standards/expectations and accomplish the arduous task of teaching them grade level objectives with amazing and engaging lessons. I am hoping the lesson plans I write for next week will be much better in pursuit of these dual goals.

OK, enough ranting for me. I will probably end up changing my mind on half of these points by the end of the week.

Charter Schools

2006-06-04T15:24:00.000-05:00

The purpose of this post is to discuss charter schools, a topic that was inspired by reading a paper written by one of the MTC second-year teachers, Evan Couzo. This post is very indecisively written and I will have to resist the need to continually revise it. Anyway, Couzo's paper asserts that charter schools and voucher programs are a new development in education has served to increase student performance.

This is has prompted me to revisit a thought that has been circulating in my head for years. Are public schools as we know them are worth saving? Would it just be better to cut our losses and try something new?

The state of Mississippi is perhaps the most stark picture of public school failure. By most measurements, the public schools are among the nation's worst. Those with the most resources (middle and upper class whites) have abandoned the system. Those with the least (poor blacks) are trapped in it.

From what I gather from the films and hearing MTC teachers, the situation on the ground is not always the best (to be subtle). Administration and teachers are often on totally different pages. Members of one or both of the groups could be grossly incompetent in their jobs and are not invested in the success or failure of the students since they most likely will have a job the next year doing the exact same thing. Children are slipping through the cracks, making it to high school wihtout basic math or literacy skills.

Are charter schools the answer? If we exposed public education to competition, would things get better? Couzo's paper seems to suggest so. I have heard many competing studies on the issue and I think it is less clear cut than he suggests. Either way, it is clear that we have very little to lose. We already have a flawed product and to me it is worth risking for something better.

In theory, as a teacher (maybe even a long-term one), I don't think I should be scared of facing competition from others schools or teachers. If my peers and I good teachers, students will want to come to my class and school. The charter school survives another day. If my peers and I are bad teachers, my school will fail to keep its charter and it would be a good sign that I need to look at other career paths.

It is a little disturbing to me that schools are increasingly being exposed to market forces. I always thought education was about a community providing a common good to its children. It makes me sad that the community has given up on a lot of its kids and that now we must seek competition as our savior.

Expectations

2006-06-01T17:32:00.000-05:00

If the last two weeks has been an indicator, change is perhaps the only constant in my life. Two weeks ago I turned in my last college paper. That kicked off a period of time in which I would fly home to South Carolina, buy a new car in a 72-hour window, fly back to Amherst, graduate from Amherst, fly back home to South Carolina four hours later, and then make the drive to Mississippi.

Teaching high school in Mississippi is clearly not the easy path. I knew that when I chose to come here in February. I had the admission to Vanderbilt Law School in my hand. I could have accepted it, chilled out during the summer, coasted through law school, and then made a ridiculous amount of money. Yet it didn't feel right. I felt like I was doing a disservice to myself and the world. A lot of thinking and praying was done. A lot of people were consulted.

The decision I made is obviously clear. I deferred the offer from Vandy for two years (and maybe several more depending on how this turns out) and decided to take the chance.

Now that I am fairly settled down I have to once again ask myself a huge question. What do I expect from the MTC and teaching in particular? This question has been swirling around in my head and I still can't settle on an answer. I should just list the big ones.

1) I expect it to be hard work
2) I expect to cry at least once
3) I expect to overexert myself trying to move mountains
4) I expect to fall short of perfection
5) I expect to move my class forward academically
6) I expect to do at least a reasonable job
7) I expect the first few weeks to be disasterous

At no point did I really expect a walk in the roses (or maybe the Magnolia). I have read too many blogs and heard to many horrific teaching stories for that to be the case. It is a minor miracle that nobody has scared me out of teaching. Because for all the bad things I have heard I also have heard a lot of amazing things: the kid who finally got something, a class that made some academic strides, or maybe a teacher who learned something about himself.

It is clear that I am not a natural teacher. I am prone to being nervous and awkward moments while in front of people for the very first time. There are so many reasons I could fail. But there is one reason I plan to succeed: I willing to do whatever it takes to be a successful teacher. In my case, that will be a ton of work. That's OK. Work builds character. I have a ton of it.

I think it is pretty clear that they need me here. My biggest hope and fear is that I will fall in love with this place and need them even more.