Back to School with a Glass Half Full

This August marks my third year writing this blog. In the previous two years, I’ve shared some back to school tips and ideas for classroom lessons to kick off the year, and those concepts serve me in good stead year after year. During our “back to school” hoopla this year, however, the heavy weight of intense state budget cuts, increased class sizes, and H1N1 fears blanketed all the meetings, and I realized I’d like to use this blog as a kind of teacher meditation space. I don’t plan to get annoyingly metaphysical, but I may indulge a little more of my teacher Pollyanna. Honestly, I don’t have answers for what confronts public education lately. I’m not great at my yoga practice (my son can be heard chirping, “Mommy, that’s not what the lady on TV is doing with her body!”), and I may need to vent in this venue from time to time, but for the most part, my plans involve some rose colored glasses. I think I’m really going to need that kind of focus this year, and I hope my readers will find discussions here that lift the teaching spirit more often than depress it.

With that in mind, I’d like to welcome the 09-10 school year with a Top Ten List of the Best Pieces of Teaching Advice I’ve gotten so far. Every new school year, I flip through my memories of past First Days of School. So many wonderful educators have shaped my growth as a teacher, and so I’d like to pass along these pearls of wisdom in the digital faculty room we share here:

10 Take the Winter Holidays Off—Truly

9 Take the Free Training a School System has to Offer

8 Don’t Limit How Much Students Write to How Much can be Graded

7 Be Sure to have a Major Writing Assignment Graded before Mid-Term

6 Actually, Our Students are not Our Kids

5 Plan the Quiet Parts of a Lesson

4 Sometimes, It’s Okay to be My Own Substitute

3 Greet Students as They Enter the Classroom Every Day

2 Give Students a Genuine Chance to Make a Different Choice Every Day

1 “Be Yourself, K. J.”

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Refreshing the Palate

Sometime in middle school, my parents took me to an especially fancy meal. I don’t remember if the meal celebrated someone’s anniversary or perhaps it might have been Mother’s Day. I don’t remember what I ordered or what I wore. I have only vague impressions of the room—lots of French windows, cloth napkins. My memory centers on the small dollops of sorbet served between two of the courses. Perched on tender twists of white paper, pink scoops of watermelon and mint ice waited to melt quickly on our tongues. The remarkable pleasure of the slightly sweetened ice lit up my mouth. Back in the days before ice dispensing home refrigerators, the crushed ice struck my twelve year old self as sheer luxury.

The experience gave me an appreciation for the power of small, quality refreshment. In the past week, I graded and returned summer research essays, and I administered final exams. Our first day of in-service for the fall semester falls on Thursday, August 20^th. Between now and then, I’m mixing up some figurative sorbet. We’re part of the economy choosing a “stay-cation” this year, and I’ve got a few tidbits planned to refresh my teaching palate. I’ve got some crafting plans with my little guy, and a pile of stuff to read and enjoy. A childhood girlfriend will be flying in for a visit, and my husband and I plan to get to the latest Harry Potter film. I’m looking forward to coming back to both my classroom and this blog space in a few short weeks refreshed and ready for another course of ideas and discussion…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Recreation

'Tis that special time of year when teachers of all shapes, sizes, and ideological persuasions find themselves humming Alice Cooper. Even for those of us who teach summer programs, June, July, and August just feel more relaxed.

Part of my summer recreation is catching up on all the television I miss during the year because it comes on after 9 p.m. I feel secure enough in this education forum to confess that I cannot watch television shows that begin after 9 p.m. I fall asleep right there on the couch. Teaching requires early rising and to compensate, I take to my bed around 9 p.m. So, no, friends with jobs outside of education, I didn’t see Lost or Grey’s Anatomy or House or…or…or…I read the reviews in the paper and then I catch up via Netflix or Hulu during the summer. (Oh, yeah, I don’t have a TiVo either. Truly lame public educator here…)

So as I clicked through Hulu for things I’ve missed, I stumbled upon Glee. I’d seen a little bit about it in the papers, but I’d written it off as a branch of the doesn't-interest-me High School Musical tree. Then this blurb on the Fox website caught my eye: “Will Schuester, a young optimistic teacher, has offered to take on the Herculean task of restoring McKinley's Glee Club to its former glory. Everyone around him thinks he's nuts. He's out to prove them all wrong.” “A young optimistic teacher?” There’s going to be a television show about an optimistic teacher? Now I could write volumes about how teachers (especially English teachers) have been portrayed in television and movies, but suffice it to say that the more favorable portrayals of teachers show us as resilient under trying circumstances. Optimistic? I don’t think I had ever seen the media group “optimistic” with “teacher,” so I gave Glee a whirl.

Please watch it. We deserve an hour like Glee provides at the end of the school year. It fictionalizes high school just enough. It’s like Election without the bitterness, the Best in Show for high school show choirs. It’s affectionate. It’s effervescent. It makes me want to go see a high school choir competition. It reminds me why I pray my son joins band or choir. The series won’t begin until the fall, but I’m already looking forward to catching up on episodes next summer…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Stepping back and Breathing in...

The winds that blow through my educational institution this March warn of increased class sizes, smaller budgets, and more emphasis on measurable outcomes. My students confront the state exam next week, a measurable outcome that significantly impacts us all. If I let it, these problems can suck me dry. Sometimes I spend hours debating with colleagues, reading professional publications, and racking my own brain, trying to think of answers to the big problems facing public education today. Ultimately, I realize that I am a teacher, and regardless of the system’s trends, I need to protect my own pedagogical fire in these winds. What do I believe I am there to teach when I stand before my students?

Luckily for my buffeted soul, I remembered a key influence on my pedagogical fire, Elizabeth Hutton Turner’s Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things. Even more amazingly, I found the book quickly amidst my piles. Comfort flashed through me as I just ran my hands over the cover. Ten years ago, I first read Turner’s essay, “The Real Meaning of Things” in a coffee shop in Dupont Circle, steps away from the Phillips Collection gift shop where I impulsively purchased the book. It fell easily to the pages most pertinent to my spirit, to the passages that most call my name. Turner explains the effects Arthur Wesley Dow’s philosophies had upon O’Keeffe’s work. She writes, “Dow wrote, ‘The study of composition means an art education for the entire people, for every child can be taught to compose—that is to know and feel beauty and to produce it in simple ways.’” My mind instantly transposed these ideas for the visual arts to the written arts. With kindred recognition, I read on: “O’Keeffe told her high school students to find art in the everyday: ‘when you buy a pair of shoes, or place a window in the front of a house or address a letter or comb your hair, consider it carefully, so that it looks well.’ Max Weber, a former student of Dow’s…instructed his classes…with much the same mantra: ‘Culture will come when every man will know how to address himself to the inanimate simple things of life. A pot, a cup, a piece of calico, a chair, a mantel, a frame, the binding of a book, the trimming of a dress…these we live with. Culture will come when people touch things with love and see them with a penetrating eye…’” Sigh. I find just typing such sentiments a gorgeous experience.

When I teach students the magic of words shifting parts of speech as they move about a sentence or how the scansion in a sonnet reinforces the meaning of the words, I believe I liberate them to lives of simple beauty. I do. If they can find adventure through text and exhilaration through writing, they can live lives without boundaries, the rich inner lives of those who see beauty and gain wisdom from the everyday. (It’s the way I want to remember to live, too.) No one needs to agree with me. No school system needs to adopt this philosophy as its core curriculum. These are some of the ideas that inspire me. Reading this essay, feeling in line with artists empowering others, that’s what lights me up when I stand before my students even if we’re reviewing for a state exam. My pedagogical fire is my secret weapon, and no one will protect it but me. I’m not putting this book back in the pile. I want to leave it where I can see it, especially while these winds blow hard. Teachers must find and protect what excites them about education. We owe it to ourselves and our students.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Resisting Lip Service

I don’t like lip service. If I endorse something verbally, I try to follow through on it personally. It’s a process, to be sure, but as I stumble through this life, I try to be authentic (even when I’m authentically wrong!). We start a new semester every January, and I get new classes of students. Some students are new to me and some students I’ve had before. I believe that each student deserves a clean slate on the first day of class. I do. Truly. However, when my class roster greets me with the names of students who failed my class in December, I sometimes struggle to follow through on my clean slate ideology.

Giving a clean slate in January seems more difficult than giving a clean slate in August. In August when I see a familiar name on my roster, I think, “Well, maybe so-and-so’s done some growing up over the summer.” But in three weeks? How much personal growth and maturity can happen in three weeks? It just takes more prayer and meditation to conjure up that attitude in January.

This week, a young student whose name brought a quick flashback of frustrating moments to mind I’ve taught before came half an hour late to the first class, greeting me with a big grin. I smiled, gave the student the assignment the class sat working on, and kept teaching. During a quiet moment a few minutes later, the student walked up to me and said, “You’re going to kill me. I don’t have any paper.” I smiled with rue and recollection and handed over paper.

Ideologically, I don’t want to be the teacher who laughs and shakes her head and says snottily, “Of course you don’t have paper.” I didn’t do that. Yet. It’s difficult to write about this because I’d love to say that all my years of experience have made me immune to this kind of human pettiness. This student creates a teaching challenge because the ability to learn sits intact and beautiful within this young mind, awaiting the arrival of the willingness to learn. If some other teacher had this student this January, I would say, “That student is a good kid who deserves a fresh start.” Why is it so difficult to provide that fresh start myself? Being late and forgetting paper are small infractions when the slate is clean, but it didn’t feel that way when it happened with this familiar student… Where can I flush my build-up of frustration and disappointment with this student, so we can both begin again?

To follow through on really giving a fresh start to students even when I know better, I have to stick to some good habits. I need to get enough sleep. In my opinion, snotty teaching is fueled by fatigue. I need to eat well. I need to schedule in family and leisure time, because when I feel like “I have no life,” I get frustrated more easily in my classroom. I need to continue my policy of non-engagement when teachers complain about students together. Do I ever complain about students? Sure! Obviously, I’ll even write about it extensively and post it on the Internet, but I try to refer to students without names or identifying characteristics. My colleagues and I often teach the same students, and I don’t want to taint either the teacher’s or the student’s future experiences. If someone wants to complain about a student by name, I walk away or change the subject. It fosters an ugly kind of teaching fungus I don’t want to breathe.

When the tired, discouraged, and jaded voice about a student rants from within my own head, however, I struggle. I do. I am. I poured a lot of energy and hope into this kid last time. Even though I know grades are students’ responsibility, I feel rejected by this person because my class did not star in the student’s universe, and I’m still licking those wounds. (Whenever I have an ugly teaching feeling, it almost always roots itself in narcissism. Ugh.) I need to put the sign back in my center drawer that says, “IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU, KATE!” and look at the student with fresh eyes. It’s a new day, right? The student could have paper tomorrow, right?

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

The Calm before the Storm

This year, I decided to give my students the full Thanksgiving vacation to finish up their research essays, which gives me the long weekend without “the stack.” I’ve made a number of changes to this assignment this semester, and I checked over all the resulting drafts yesterday. I’m proud to say—drum roll, please—the drafts did not leave me nauseous and depressed! Most significantly, I changed the topic of the assignment this semester. In the past, I’ve asked students to pick an ethical dilemma related to a field they might want to pursue. Generally, students wrote about medical and media issues. After some summer rumination, I made the topic “a problem facing public education today.” Students have chosen to write on a wide range of education issues, and it looks like they just have more of their own ideas on these topics. The drafts appeared to be less packed with block quotations to meet the page minimum. Okay, okay, so I haven’t actually read through their arguments carefully yet. Okay, okay, so no Turnitin.com reports yet reveal places where they lifted liberally from their sources. This holiday weekend, I’m emotionally banking some optimism before collecting the pile. Reality will arrive soon enough, right?

I know that once I start grading the stack, my enthusiasm for creating big changes to the assignment will be snuffed out by exhaustion and perhaps a nagging melancholy that even a perfect assignment would not reach everybody. So! Before that begins, I’ve been catching up on some professional reading. I really enjoyed Lorna Collier’s “The ‘C’s of Change:’ Students—and Teachers—Learn 21^st Century Skills” from NCTE’s November 2008 Council Chronicle. According to Collier, the “C’s of Change” “include creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, self-control, and comprehension.” The article discusses different aspects of that list, but I found some commentary on social networking especially interesting: “Students still need teachers to show them how to navigate the digital age, how to mine the information overload for meaning, and how to make wise connections through social networks.”

In my research essay assignment, I feel like I accomplish the first two items in that list. However, I have not asked students to use their Facebook or blogging skills “to make wise connections.” The concept appeals to me. What if I asked students to use a social networking connection as one of the resources for their research essay? I imagine they could email a principal or participate in an education blog or find whomever they find on My Space. I’d have to come up with a series of vetting questions for them to use to determine if the source could be trusted, but I’m willing to bet I’ll be shocked with what they can find. Judging from how often students try to text in class, they’ve really honed this skill—why not harvest that skill for academic goals?

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

In My Head, It’s the Holidays Already…

In my family, we celebrate Christmas. When I was growing up, my mother had a strict rule about no Christmas songs, decorations, or the like before Thanksgiving; I still respect that rule. However, now that I’m both a parent and a teacher, I have to plan for the holiday before December is upon me.

My first year of teaching, our principal came on the PA system to scold teachers en masse and in front of our students for taking leave in December. “Teachers, please do not take personal leave in December!” he boomed. “We cannot find substitutes during this time. Besides, why would people about to get two weeks off need time off now?” (Suffice it to say, we were not managed well.) Even though at the time of that announcement I still flew home to my parents’ house for Christmas, and I certainly, as a twenty-three year old untenured teacher, had not used any personal leave, his query about why teachers would need leave ahead of the holidays made me shake my head. Obviously, he wasn’t the one responsible for the holiday magic in his house.

I currently work in a school calendar where my semester grades are due before Christmas. I will get research essays and final projects just after Thanksgiving, and by the time I lift my head, it will be December 20^th. Even when I worked within calendars that ended in January, I tried to clear my desk of grading before the break. Big projects couldn’t withstand the two weeks of stasis, so I had a similar pre-holiday grading crunch. Besides the grading crunch, December brings with it numerous social gatherings, and they all seem to be two weeks earlier than years ago. Weekends will be full of fun that won’t include planning or shopping.

So that’s why you’ll find me humming along to Johnny Mathis’ “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” in these weeks just after Halloween and before Thanksgiving. (The song is only in my head; I don’t actually start playing the CD’s until after Thanksgiving, Mom, I promise!) I’m happily drafting holiday menus for the company gracious enough to join us, and my son and I have a few craft projects underway. Sometimes I feel part of the Christmas sprawl that advertisers have thrust upon us, but mostly, I feel anticipation. Teaching may be part of why I can’t spend December preparing for the holidays, but teaching also has taught me how to plan ahead, so I can do both.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Ode to the School Secretary

Walking by an office window recently, I caught sight of a little Halloween decoration on someone’s desk. Suddenly, my mind flooded with affection for the school secretaries who have made my teaching life easier.

My father, a thirty eight year teaching veteran, chaperoned my first school secretary love affair. I can’t remember the woman’s name, but the front office secretary in his high school took a shine to me. She always had a little treat for me when I traipsed after my dad, keeping him company during summer days when he went in to verify book counts or in afternoons before he worked as the announcer for the school’s wrestling matches. She gave me a little toy bank she made herself that I kept until I left for college. I knew her from the ages of possibly five to seven; sadly, I can’t even picture her face. I can see her hands, opening her drawers, giving me paper to draw, making me feel welcome “behind the counter,” which seemed to me a land like Oz.

When I first began teaching, I taught in an urban school district. A succinct version of perhaps the most formative years of my professional life would categorize the experience as challenging. After three years, I got a job in a more stabilized district, and the young woman who got my schedule quit the third day of school on the front office answering machine. I stayed through three years because of my father’s guidance, affection for my students, fellow teachers’ advice and understanding, my own abject poverty, and the love and support of several school secretaries, by then called administrative assistants.

I laugh as I realize my relationships with these women looks remarkably like the one I had with the school secretary when I was six years old. Unlike teacher friends, who might share my prep or lunch period one semester but not the next, administrative assistants are reliably available. These women found the heart to decorate their desks for the seasons even when the challenges we faced as an institution left many of us without the energy for such niceties. They lovingly compared me to their daughters, they assured me that my nascent efforts at strong teaching counted, they clucked their tongues at my travails, handing me Hershey kisses and promising things would get better with time and experience. One woman even fixed me up with her nephew, a lovely man who ultimately wasn’t my cup of tea but who treated me gloriously, a sweet reprieve from my work life.

These women made sure I never missed a health care open enrollment. They ensured that I knew ahead of time when a parent came in to see me. They gave me a little oasis at their desks, a place where someone liked me and refrained from judgment, putting aside the piles of work that needed their attention and meeting my needs instead.

The administrative assistant with whom I now work treats me with the same kind of caring affection. Since I’m no longer a new teacher, she grants me different support, the support of one working woman to another. She shared her pregnancy stories as I carried my son; she makes sure my schedule works with my duel role as teacher and parent; she always acts as if listening to me and my issues is just what she was planning to do in that moment anyway.

Amongst the many intangibles that make a school successful lies the school secretary. May all teachers find a little haven in the school office.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher