Saturation Point

March rears her head in just a day or so, and with her, she brings the state testing for which I’ve been preparing my students. The only thing I’m confident about is that I am more concerned, more prepared, and more focused about the testing than any of my students appear to be.

I am pacing myself through grading the piles of practice essays, forcing myself to stop when I grow inattentive instead of rushing through the last ones in the pile just so I can say I got it done. No, I step back, exist under the nagging sense that grading is waiting for me and return to it with a fresher eye the next morning. This kind of discipline grows from my belief that careful, specific grading on my part will inspire students to careful, specific editing on their part the next time they write.

My students’ attendance grows increasingly spotty at this time of year; there’s not much on the calendar to look forward to besides our testing dates, and I suppose I grow more serious and disturbingly earnest around this time, too. I might do a mini-lesson here and there of something fun or interesting, but the major thrust of each lesson now is test preparation; we administer it in two weeks time. Things students do frequently, like working on an out of class assignment while I’m reviewing a lesson, upset me more as we enter this phase of test preparation. I get tense—“Listen! Pay attention! Please trust me that I know what you should be doing!”

If history repeats itself, the majority of my students will do fine, and I will relax again. It’s just that saturation point in the semester. I’ve taught them the test skills. They’ve gained much of what they will gain. I can’t move on yet—the test is nigh. I need to hold them here, reinforcing, emphasizing, (sometimes) begging. It’s not the time of year that made me want to be a teacher, but it is one of the required elements, at least at this point in educational politics.

It’s the time of the year when I feel like my students should know certain things, and when they don’t, I take it personally. (If I really link my mental health to students’ mastery of the semi-colon or apostrophe, I could be doomed.) It’s the time of the year when the end seems merely theoretical. It’s the time of the year when we as teachers need to breathe fresh air into our own lungs as people beyond the classroom because until the testing is over, the air at school has gone a bit stale. I’ve hit my saturation point. It’s time to meet my classroom responsibilities while casting my horizon outside the school door. An art project, a new fiction author, plans for a weekend trip—there are various ways to remind myself that while I use teaching to define who I am, teaching doesn’t have to define my entire life, especially when it becomes so test-preparation centered. This weekend, I’m going to try to focus upon the things I really like about being a literate adult. Sometimes teaching writing makes me forget the joys of reading and writing; without that joy, I know I’ll lose the spark that makes teaching worthwhile, and that’s too high a cost for any test.

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

Recovering from My Mistake

I raised my voice to a student yesterday. It wasn’t worth it. She’s been absent for more than a month, and she called me with a list of reasons and things she felt I’d done wrong, and after listening to her, I started to speak. And she kept talking. And talking. I started with a sharp, “Excuse me” that escalated to a shrill (okay, I shouted) “EXCUSE ME! LET ME SPEAK!” She followed up with a rousing, repeating refrain of “WHO’RE YOU YELLING AT? WHO’RE YOU YELLING AT?” and explained vehemently how she expected to be treated by her teachers, and alas, it did not include yelling. Neither one of us hung up, and we talked our way back to reasonable, and she apologized for misunderstanding a few things, and we have a meeting scheduled to address her needs, but man, I’ve been sick over the yelling match. It has cost me so much more than I gained.

Why did I yell? I yelled because, in that moment, I clung to the mythology that as her instructor, she should show me respect and not speak over me when it is my turn to speak. Ha ha ha. Maybe that’s true some places, but I’ve made a decision to teach students who don’t come from an educational tradition, and the notion that teachers inherently get respect is foreign. It is earn-respect-as-you-go around here, and I know that. I signed up for that. It’s just when she kept talking over me, I forgot, and I just wanted my rank to assure me my turn. Yelling gained me nothing and lost me ground with this student. Also, should I have further problems with this student, she can always say to my department chair and my dean that I yelled at her, and it will be true. Yikes.

So now that I’ve smoothed things over with the student, it is time to forgive myself. I’ve spent a lot of the last fifteen hours since the incident replaying the event and seeing if I can justify my behavior. I really can’t. I think it was a human moment, and I am entitled to be human, but it wasn’t a shining teacher moment, no matter how I look at it in various lights. I’m relieved I didn’t curse or name call. Sheesh. When I lose myself to frustration like this, I realize I need to spend more time trying to be happy in my personal life, doing things I enjoy. I draw upon the energy that enjoyment gives me when I’m in difficult communications, and obviously, my reserve is a little too dry. I try to read lovely articles about teaching like this one, and remember that I’m not teaching everyone; some kids love school and reading. Going for a run helps. At a former school, I used to run with a fellow teacher, and we joked about getting t-shirts that read “Pound Pavement not Students.” Confessing to fellow teachers has always helped me, too. I’ve always been surrounded by the kind of peers who support me when I’ve made a mistake like this one, who reassure me they’ve had bad moments, too. Knowing that teachers I admire have stepped off the patience wagon helps me to let it go.

I always spend a little time when this happens wishing I could be more intimidating; I don’t think this student would have talked over just any teacher. I have an accessible affect that can be misunderstood as easy to bully, I suppose. However, I doubt I can conjure up a new affect now. So self acceptance is part of this post-mistake process for me, too…Sometimes I’m not a teacher, but a person waiting for her turn to share her side, and I, too, want to feel heard. I know from experience that silence would have worked better than yelling, but I made things right with the student, and now I will forgive myself for my moment, brush myself off, and work at keeping my love of teaching at the forefront of my mind.

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

"Hey, Teacher, May I Have a Do-Over, Please?"

Well, quite frankly, I don’t think many of my students use this orphan-like phrase when they ask me to forget the past and let them begin again. We are six weeks into our semester, and just in time for Valentine’s Day of Love, some missing students have surfaced and asked me to find it in my heart to forgive them and let them begin again. One gentleman has had three consecutive weeks of absences; I’d stopped counting him when determining copies of handouts. He returned contrite and naïve, speaking vaguely of eye infections. “Can’t I just do all the work and catch up?” he asked earnestly, his eyes begging me to let bygones be bygones.

It is a teacher’s cliché to resent student versions of “Did I miss anything?” It feels like admitting that I am just a distributor and collector of papers to say, “Oh of course you can make up the past three weeks with a packet!” Perhaps if I put less of my heart into pacing and designing everything, it would seem less hurtful. To be fair to students, they didn’t invent this system of making up work. I’ve had numerous administrators direct me to “make up a packet” for my units on Shakespeare or research essay writing or other huge undertakings that use up all my teaching talents to try to get intangible concepts across to students. I resent the reductive nature of make up work more for how it reduces me and my teaching than for the work it takes to compile it. And that I fear may be vanity…

As for the work it takes to compile make up work, I must be honest and say I resent that, too. Here I’ve been at school, keeping my end of the bargain and teaching. A perpetually absent child has now returned, his return a harbinger of paperwork I must now assemble. Yet, philosophically, I believe in second chances. I believe in letting students make new choices today based upon the insights and maturity they have gained. I just have trouble believing it in practice. So, I’ve come up with a little compromise. I tell my earnest-turning-a-new-leaf students that yes, they can make up what they have missed, and yes, I will compile that for them. However, I will only allow them to make up work if they have good attendance for the next two weeks. If these students truly do return and attend and keep up with the current work as best they can, I find my desire to catch them up generates all on its own. After two weeks of attendance and effort on a student’s part, I am again smitten. Intoxicated with the potential of keeping a lost sheep in my flock, I tend to put together a much better make up packet. This compromise, I figure, keeps me from missing anything…

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

My Teaching Wardrobe Re-Visited

As seniors in high school, my friend and I used to pass notes about our English teacher’s clothes. We did this because her fabulous clothes exceeded the outfits our other teachers wore and because we were sixteen. “It’s a suede skirt day!” I wrote to my friend who would not have our classy teacher for two more class periods. I, myself, have not garnered that kind of praise from students with my fashion sense. Early on in my teaching career, my utilitarian fashion approach caused a student to exclaim, “See! Navy blue pants! I told you…I mean, it is Wednesday!”

When I began teaching, I had to transform my early nineties grunge collection of thrift shop granny sweaters and floor length skirts into a professional wardrobe with little to no money. Since I couldn’t shoot for the moon, I instead strove for “neat” and “appropriate.” Additionally, I’ve always lived at least a forty-five minute commute to my school, so “crumpled” has come easily to my overall look, too. Looking around at my fellow teachers, I don't think I'm alone. Most of us look nice, but I don't think a bunch of us together would be mistaken for members of a city law firm.

As a younger teacher, I tried to be sexually innocuous. I wore blouses that didn’t cling or have deep cut necklines; I wore pants or skirts that hid curves. I’ve always focused on students with lower skill sets, an issue often accompanied by immaturity. I didn’t want my femininity to be a distraction. (Okay, so maybe I wore something cute once, but after a day of "Whoo-hoo! Teacher's got a date tonight--can it be with me?" I decided to go for something more bland.) A bad experience with spit balls of gum covering the back of my head one day led to the habit of pulling my hair up instead of leaving it down. (The worst part of that day was not knowing when the gum had gotten into my hair; my classroom management in those days left something to be desired!) In the end, these various factors distilled into a recipe of plain shirt + long denim skirt + bun clip = good to go.

I’m thirty-five now, and the likelihood that I’ll be a sexual distraction has diminished somewhat, which is probably why I’d like to tighten up my look a little. While I am still “neat” and “appropriate,” I fear I’m slipping into “dowdy.” However, now there are different factors to consider. If I teach in stockings and clicking heels, people assume I have a meeting with administration. Where I teach, the academics slouch around in cotton and prints and slip on mules; administrators wear tailored outfits in dark solids with shiny leather shoes. A shift in uniform at my age could be seen as a shift in career focus. (“Look who wants to be an administrator!”) Another alternative is the “school spirit” route, but wearing shirts with the school emblem tucked into my black jeans every day requires a kind of cheer I find difficult to muster day after day.

I might as well face it; other people have to look at me all day long, so I don’t get to hide if I’m in a blouse that pulls or a skirt that rides up. Unlike my classy teacher from years ago who read The Bald Soprano aloud to us students while she sat perched on a stool, I march around the room and gesture frequently, often getting sweaty as I try to rouse enthusiasm for proper use of the semicolon. I teach with overhead markers and grade with sometimes sticky gel pens, so I’ve never wanted to spend lots of money on formally tailored work clothes. I wear shoes that withstand being on my feet and perhaps crossing a field during a fire drill. Maybe I look exactly like what I am: somebody’s teacher, somebody’s mom, and somebody who gets the job done. Maybe I’ll start investing in a better wardrobe for the weekend instead…

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

Clicking my Way through Intermittent Mediocrity

Okay, so I’m not the teacher I like to be every day. Some days I’d evaluate my own teaching as “eh.” Yesterday, my lesson ended 10 minutes early. Now, in my own defense, it’s an hour and forty minute class working on remedial grammar and writing skills in a course I’ve never taught before, but still, ten minutes is too long. To boot, I gave a quiz, and I didn’t notice a kid had his cell phone out until a colleague walked by my room. As we gave our little waves to each other, I saw her eye drawn to said student. I scurried over and took care of it, but my cheeks still burn to have been that teacher. Here’s the honest truth: Despite caring intensely and working hard, sometimes, I am that teacher.

I can’t put my finger on an exact pattern. I’m not that teacher too often because I hate the feeling of knowing my lessons have fallen short, so I step it up after a day like yesterday; however, I can’t say these days are totally rare either. Sustaining quality teaching isn’t easy, and there are days I struggle for the enthusiasm and attentiveness it takes to be more than a moderator of activities.

All this has been on my mind as I read a good piece in The New York Times about the use of clicker technology in the classroom. One of the teachers in the piece talks about the prep work involved in loading clicker technology with the questions needed for review. I use clickers in this oh-so-long-grammar-review-by-the-end-of-the-110 minutes-none-of-us-cares class. (Our school uses a technology called Turning Point.) It’s true that I have to load the questions into a PowerPoint-like format before getting to use it, which can be time consuming. Fifteen grammar questions take me about fifteen minutes to create. (I’m usually copying content off of handouts; I’m not originating the content.) However, now I have the questions made for each semester I teach the class, so that payoff is pretty big if the content stays static, like with grammar.

Why am I discussing clickers along with my own mediocrity? Because I think clicker technology unnecessarily intimidates teachers…My class yesterday? We did about twenty minutes in a clicker session, and it delivered me from total mediocrity to merely intermittent mediocrity. (Hey, some days I’ll take what I can get!) Even though I felt low energy, I could lean on the clicker technology to create momentum for my class. The deadly, “Let’s go over the homework” part of grammar practice becomes more dynamic when students click in their responses. I can see whether or not everyone has at least guessed at each question; whereas, when we check homework without clicker technology, I find it hard to engage more than the student I’m currently calling upon for the answer. Once I know everyone has responded, I push a button and a Who Wants to be a Millionaire-type bar graph shows the range of responses in the class. Students who don’t understand get to see they are not alone. We all get to see progress as more and more students get the answers right as we move through the review. That’s gold in a grammar review session; very rarely do students really feel like progress is being made.

Pretty much all this happens while I push a mouse. By investing fifteen to twenty minutes a day in preparation, I get to use this clicker lesson in every class of that prep I teach forevermore especially when it’s January, and I’m stumbling a little. In my humble opinion, teaching for twenty to thirty years is a marathon requiring patience, enthusiasm, faith, intelligence, integrity, forgiveness, and lots of energy. There will be days along the way when I’m not impressed with myself. Incorporating techniques like clicker technology can help me keep moving on days when I might otherwise stall. What other experiences do people have with clickers? What say the teaching masses?

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

Yes, They're Watching Our Numbers--Thank Goodness!

Who are they? Our department chairs. Our deans. Our principals. Our students. Our students’ parents. According to The New York Times, New York City plans to pilot a program isolating how much teachers impact students’ standardized test scores. As in, how much does Teacher A influence scores as compared to Teacher B? As in, did I properly prepare and teach my students this year? I don’t know, Kate, let’s look at your scores. Why, look! The scores are published on the Internet! I’m impressed with the factors NYC plans to take into consideration: kids on free lunch, kids classified with special education, class size, student attendance, previous year’s scores. Of course these numbers can be skewed, but if kept in the proper narrative as NYC plans, they should be a pretty interesting number to consider. The school district swears these numbers will be one of several factors used to assess teachers, not the only factor. I say, it’s about time.

In my experience, good teachers have been using their students’ standardized test scores as a way to evaluate their own performance for years and years and years and years. If my students score below the department, district, state, or whatever average, (after considering my population’s factors like the ones listed above) I look at what I’m doing. I try new things. I consult peers and read more resources. The teachers I know who love teaching all do the same. We use these numbers as a tool to look at our teaching. My administration already knows these numbers and uses them to form opinions about me and my teaching. Informally, these numbers have already shaped my teaching career.

Formally, however, I’ve been evaluated by more mercurial measures, like how many kids wear a hat into my room. (I can get the hats off once they are in my room, but somehow, I always end up with a high percentage of students who don them in the hallway.) I always make sure to strap my share of extra-curricular service to my back, which curries favor on any yearly evaluation, but as my family responsibilities increase, I worry that not being able to sponsor clubs will impact how I’m assessed as a teacher. My experiences being observed have varied; I’ve never had a problem being observed by my subject department chair, but not all of my administrative observations have gone as I would have liked. One vice-principal would come for three or maybe even seven minutes. Sadly, I had a vice-principal tell me to write my own observation and leave it for him to sign. More egregious was the administrative observation that I had to sign my name to without fixing his sentence fragments or spelling errors.

Have I had positive observation experiences with administrators? Yes. I had a principal come watch for the entire period, script the lesson, and then spend half an hour discussing pedagogy and philosophy with me. In fact, I wept in his office over the fact that every time I managed to get mainstreamed kids up to grade level, he gave me more kids on an IEP. I felt like he heaped so many variables on me that I would never see my overall class average improve. He handed me a tissue and nodded kindly. He then told me, “Kate, you are right. However, I can’t afford to worry about your numbers if I know that your class is the optimal place I have to offer a student in my school.” I wept some more, but this time with pride, and I left his office with a better sense of the big picture with which he had to deal. So, yes, I’ve had an incredible administrative observation and evaluation, from one of the great administrators of my experience. Sometimes, though, these evaluations vary too much depending upon who does the observation. My point is that our students’ standardized test scores may be a much less subjective measure of us teachers than some of the measures used currently.

I think it will protect teachers who work well with kids but don’t stand in the fickle sunshine of administrative favor. Quite frankly, if this additional factor can get rid of the people in my school who only teach for half a class period, don’t return or evaluate written work, and gossip about students’ sexual exploits, I’m all for it. Why do we fear this so much? Aren’t we often evaluated now by popularity and cooperation more than effective teaching? If our students continually perform poorly, aren’t we obligated to look at that?

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

I'm Teaching a New Prep...(gulp)

I’m teaching a new prep for the first time in several years, and I’ve forgotten how it feels. Yes, I know where I have to get students in the end, but I don’t know exactly what we’ll do each class period to get there. Hopefully, no student will ask me what we’re doing the week of March 1st because she’s going on vacation and wants the work ahead of time; I’m basically two lessons ahead of my students at this point.

Luckily, I’ve developed enough new preps to know that I need to take it one day at a time. After teaching each lesson, I learn how long it takes students to do particular tasks and what prior knowledge they truly have mastered. Without experience on those two factors, it is difficult to write lesson after lesson without getting the pacing wrong. While I understand this intellectually, I get nervous without a fat binder of semester long plans in my bag. It shocks me, actually, how tempting I find it to want to roll out a list of lesson plans without regard to what will work well. I know that developing lessons more slowly in response to what I’m finding works with students will yield higher quality stuff, but boy, do I love knowing exactly where a course is going! I frustrate myself when I force a class to go through a lesson I can tell isn’t working; by writing lessons week-to-week, I lower the likelihood of those stressful lessons. I know that. Really. Just yesterday, I found that my lesson over-estimated students’ retention of subject verb agreement. The review I’d thought would take ten minutes stretched to half an hour, pushing several activities I’d planned off until another day. If I’d written the next ten lessons, all ten would need to be written again...

Experiencing this uncertainty heightens my empathy for newer teachers, who may be teaching two or three preps for the first time simultaneously. Also, I think scratching out new lessons for the first time in too long sharpens some of my teaching skills, too; my adrenaline pumps when I realize what I have planned isn’t working how I thought it would. I’ve forgotten that my confidence in my lesson plans enables me to better weather the spontaneous (and sometimes chaotic) nature of my classroom. That confidence in lesson plans develops because I’ve taught the lessons before! For now, I need to take a deep breath and live with the fact that the first time through a new curriculum means taking it day by day and ignore the edgy feeling. Okay. Yes. I’ve decided. Teaching a new prep isn’t difficult—it’s good for me. Okay, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to check my lessons…

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