Parsing out the Teaching from the Labor

At a recent conference, I ate lunch opposite an entrepreneur who invented a company that helps colleges grade student essays via the Internet. For example, as the classroom instructor, I could give feedback to students’ first drafts. They could do a peer review on the next revision, and then send that version to the online tool to be graded by live, qualified individuals who respond in fewer than 24 hours. Then I would grade their final draft. Besides lightening my grading load, this process also gives students up to three reading audiences for one essay. After some lively debate, I left the table with one point this entrepreneur made resonating in my head: “Teachers need to identify what they do better than technology. Then they need to cultivate that and let technology do the rest.”

He argued that historically across industries, technology has increased productivity and reduced costs. He pointed out that education mostly uses technology as an alternate delivery method. Again, he told us, “Teachers need to identify what they do better than technology. Then they need to cultivate that and let technology do the rest.”

My colleague and I discussed it on the car ride home. I talked to my husband…Bored my friends with it…Dreamt about it…A world in which a portion of the grading process could be subcontracted out...A world in which I am the Master Teacher, and my time is a valued commodity not to be spent grading fill-in-the-blank vocabulary tests. On some levels, it’s intoxicating. On other levels, I’m intimidated.

I already believe in mastery quizzing; if the answers on an assessment should be the same for every student, I already have it on my class web enhancement. It takes an investment of time up front to load a multiple choice quiz into software, but watching students practice repeatedly with the instant feedback has convinced me my time is well spent on the effort. What do I do better than technology in this instance? Well, sometimes, I like to write the content myself. Not all the time…some grammar practice is universal, and I use other sources liberally. Sometimes, however, I want to customize content to my students or our particular needs at that time, and I use my expertise to do so.

I’m more uncomfortable with the idea of using standardized technology tools to help with grading student essays. I argued that I “pay witness” to students’ incremental growth by responding to each stage of their drafts myself. Is that true or merely narcissistic? Do I believe it matters that I read everything myself just because that’s what I’ve told myself to get through pile after pile? Would it be so terrible to let students have a mix of authorities read their essays through the writing process even if some of those authorities are people neither I nor my students ever meet?

If technology truly grows into assessment over the next few years, what do I do “better than technology?” The question has buzzed around my head because I identify much of my teaching with my assessment of the writing process. To see a movement (not that anyone’s offering to buy my department this tool) on the horizon that takes over parts of the assessment process intimidates me a little. If someone else lightened the assessment load, what would I put in its place as a writing instructor? I can be heard clucking my tongue, saying things like, “There’s so much I never get to,” but am I ready to get to it? Would it be an opportunity or the end of personalized feedback and an intimate learning process?

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

Reflecting Upon an Exam Pass Rate

Illness. No ride. Death in the family. Short prison stay. Oversleeping. Helping sick parents. Feeling overwhelmed. Dentist appointment. In the past two weeks, my students have given me these reasons for their absences. We take the state exam in two weeks, and students who do not pass will need to repeat the course. Additionally, my students’ state exam results will be charted and compared with my department and our cohort schools. Gulp.

More than two thirds of my students maintain excellent attendance and will most likely pass the state exam on basic writing without much trouble. They engage; they practice; they try. The one third I worry about have struggled with writing for much of their educational careers, and their lives actively impede concentration. Seriously, some of the problems they go home to would have knocked hundreds of points off my own SAT score, I’m sure.

I don’t have a magic wand for helping students pass this exam. I use clickers to promote interest; I tell anecdotes to highlight relevance; I grade writing quickly to create momentum. The content is remedial, the test unrelenting in its pursuit of the comma’s proper placement. I teach the course beyond this basic writing class, and it offers variety through its realm of ideas. This course’s canned curriculum with required multiple choice tests offers no such variety. I do different lessons at the start of the semester and once the exam is over, but right now, in the last weeks before THE TEST, I dare not deviate from the test conditioning. We take a total of six practice tests, discussing the way the questions are structured, reviewing the grammar rules in isolation of anything we might write or discuss.

I truly enjoy teaching this course, but I start to wig out about our pass rate as the test approaches and my vulnerable one third show up only intermittently. How can I drag them across the finish line if they aren’t here? We have meetings, we teachers, where we are told of our influence, of how we must relate to students, imprint upon them like baby birds, and take them to great educational distances with heartfelt dedication. I buy into that. I feel a little frenzied when I take attendance and the seats of the students I think need the most practice sit empty. Yet when they tell me where they are, (Illness. No ride. Death in the family. Short prison stay. Oversleeping. Helping sick parents. Feeling overwhelmed. Dentist appointment.) I see clearly into the face of our economy, of our community problems. Wash your hands and eat better! Pay your court fines! Set an alarm! Ask a neighbor to sit with your parent! Whistle a happy tune! Change your appointment for later in the day! Really? I can’t say any of that because it is so insufficient to these students’ problems. They might not know how to eat better. They didn’t have the money for the court fines. They sleep through alarms, exhausted from working and going to school. No one else will sit in the ER with the sick parent. Their problems are overwhelming. The dentist appointment needs to be during class because missing work would mean diminished wages. So when students tell me where they’ve been, I nod. It feels incredibly narcissistic to suggest to them that I can fix what keeps them from focusing on their studies.

Getting 100% of my students to test competency requires social resources I don’t have to offer my students. My one third will try their damnedest to be in attendance on exam day. Some of them might pass, too. However, when I look at my work as a teacher distilled to a graph of who passed and who didn’t, I need to remember that I didn’t withhold the affection or the dedication that would have pushed all those dots to the mark. Some of my students might fail this test because life can be difficult, and a public system that teaches everyone will reflect the trials people face.

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

"Lady, Step Away from the Metaphor..."

I’ve always considered myself lucky that I don’t lose my composure easily; staying calm and saying reassuring things during stress frequently helps me out as a classroom teacher. (Well, most of the time...) During stressful moments, I can seem measured as long as I don’t have to create any similes or metaphors. The figurative language I create under duress always gives my anxiety away.

If I didn’t teach literature, I may have never discovered this idiosyncrasy about myself. It first came to light when I had to videotape myself student teaching back in 1993. (The tape would provide perfect fodder for a “no teacher should do that” drinking game, by the way.) The tape showcases me at twenty, standing before an eleventh grade class of twelve self-contained, I.E.P. classified boys. With my zero years experience, I made the insightful decision to teach them feminist poetry. Anne Sexton’s Transformations to be exact. (It probably doesn’t require a viewing of the tape to laugh at me.) Shockingly, the class participation part didn’t go well. I wanted my students to write a simile, and they unanimously claimed they couldn’t think of anything. “Come on! Of course you can!” I urged. “Just pick something and compare it to something else…” The tape unflinchingly records the awkward pause as I struggle to think of a simile to show how easy it can be: My eyes search the room. My mouth hangs slightly open. My hands wave vaguely in the air. “Umm. Okay, Like…like…like…Look I’m doing it right now! For example, I could say, ‘The bell went off like a bomb in my head.’ Or I could say, ‘The flag waves like a body from the gallows.’” Oy. It goes on from there, but suffice it to say that my emotional desire to run screaming from the room as I surveyed the debris of my lesson revealed itself through my similes.

I’ve tried to avoid such pitfalls with better preparation. If I want to provide examples, I write a list of innocuous comparisons ahead of time. Once I’ve taught something before, I can usually remember the examples I’ve provided in the past. And since sixteen years have passed, teaching is less stressful now that I’m more experienced. Mostly, I do okay now, but this week, I revealed too much about my state of mind again through figurative language.

My school decided to put a departmental exam on computer, and the powers that be selected my class to help pilot it. We met in a special lab, but despite lots of troubleshooting, the pilot didn’t work, and I had to move my students back to our classroom to recoup the remainder of class time. My students bubbled with the euphoria that comes from having enjoyed thirty minutes with nothing to do. We walked back into our regular classroom, and I noticed someone new in the room, a colleague stopping by for an observation. I knew these observations would happen, but I didn’t expect one on such a raucous day; cue the stress. With a deep breath, I settled down my students and started to lead a productive lesson. Things rolled along well. However, one student got out a phone and started texting. Gently, I asked the student to put it away. “Oh, absolutely,” the student said, and put the phone under the edge of the desk, proceeding to text from the lap. Since I don’t tend to blush or yell when I get stressed, I should have reached for a rote teacher phrase, like “Please put it away in your bag.” However, I foolishly reached for a metaphor: “When my husband and I agreed not to cheat on each other, we didn’t mean ‘Don’t cheat on me where I can see you.’ We meant, ‘Don’t cheat on me at all!’” Oy, again. My class blinked and then burst out laughing. “Ms. K, you’re crazy!” The student zipped the phone into a book bag pocket, and my class observer looked at me wide-eyed. My mind reeled. Had I really just compared a texting student to a cheating spouse? Sheesh. Did my unconscious mind really feel so betrayed?

Ah, well. Maybe one day I will truly feel calm in stressful situations so that even my creative mind plays along. Until then, I think I need to just step away from the figurative language when I feel my blood pressure rise.

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

Minding My P's and Q's

At twenty, when I imagined my teaching career, I pictured myself darkening the classroom and reading Poe’s “The Raven” in a hushed, slightly theatrical voice from a stool in the center of the room. Students would sit casually, chins cupped in their hands, while their eyes shone bright with understanding and anticipation. Well. I can’t say I never have teaching moments like that, but those moments don’t make up the bulk of my day.

I didn’t realize way back then that the bulk of my teaching day would be populated not with “moments of being” during which I electrified my students with literature but with bookkeeping. Yup. Bookkeeping. Keeping attendance, identifying missing work, and tracking missing students make up a disheartening proportion of my daily tasks. Why disheartening? Well, these tasks are like the pot scrubbing parts of teaching. I cannot whip up a fabulous rapport and exciting lessons with students unless I have these elements under control just like a great meal requires a clean, well-stocked kitchen. I am committed to these tasks because being organized on attendance, missing work, and students’ status ultimately makes me more effective. I just wish doing it properly didn’t take so dang long…

If, for example, I skip my weekly habit of running a “missing assignments” report and notifying those students about the missing work or if I record a student as absent three times in a row without looking into where that student may be, I feel anxious. Making up work at the end of the grading period is one of my least favorite pursuits with students. I like to address the problem while the assignments will be fully relevant to what we’re doing in class. It also stinks to realize once a student finally resurfaces that a well-placed phone call might have brought him or her back sooner. After years at this gig, I’ve decided the trouble of staying on top of my bookkeeping pays off in the end.

Like washing a dried egg pan, however, these tasks sap the spirit. They smack of redundancy and fastidiousness. At certain points in the semester, I devote significant portions of time to them, so it helps to ensure I read a poem aloud every now and then to keep the true teaching juices flowing.

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

Maybe If I Beg for Mercy

"Please stop writing in second person voice, " I sobbed. "I beg of you. Please."

Okay, maybe that's too dramatic, but I'm currently waist deep in essay grading, and that's what I feel like saying to my students. Why is writing in second person voice such a pervasive habit for students? It's like writing kudzu...If I see a little in the introduction and start pulling, I'll find the instances of "you" have branched out and grabbed hold of the entire essay.

I give a mini-lesson on pronouns. I share with them the school of thought that second person voice is too bossy for academic writing, that it can irritate a reader like a wagging finger that begs to be slapped away. I openly confess that I will be using second person when I direct them on how to improve their writing, trying to clarify that giving directions is its rightful place in language.

Students nod. Students earn 100% on the quiz. Students continue to write with second person in their argumentative essays. "You really need to read this website." "You shouldn't let your pets on people's lawns." And my personal favorite, a sentence that uses third person voice merely as an address to set up the second person voice: "Parents, you shouldn't let your kids watch too much television." After grading a dozen or so directives, my head buzzes with regressed adolescent thoughts of rebellion.

I realize writing in second person voice might not be the writing error of greatest concern. I, too, am grateful for paragraphs without fragments. As I sit here in the trenches this weekend, however, the essays that reproach me for habits I may or may not have make me grit my teeth. I'll circle the instances of "you" and ask students to rewrite. They will do so, almost always successfully once it has been pointed out. How to prevent the problem in the first place, however, remains a teaching challenge for me.

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

The Sweet Spot

Sometimes when I fry a grilled cheese sandwich, I rush it. I toss in the sandwich even though the pan isn’t quite hot enough; I try to flip it before the cheese has started to melt, and the sandwich falls askew. But sometimes, sometimes, I flip it at exactly the right moment, and a perfectly caramelized gorgeous brown sandwich winks at me, a touch of cheddar peeking out between the slices of bread.

Sometimes when I teach writing, I struggle to help students revise. I proclaim a thesis statement too broad or supporting details too thin without the student really understanding my point; I try to explain what needs to happen with a student’s essay, but I end up frustrated with my own words. But sometimes, sometimes, I say exactly the right things, and an original, specific, viable argument dawns over students as they wave me away to the next person, jotting down their ideas to make them real.

Ah, the sweet spot. Today, I hit the sweet spot with helping my students write. I fell into a zone where I talked to students about their thesis statements, and they heard me. I don’t mean obedience; I get obedience. My students like me, and I like them. If I say, “Rewrite it,” they rewrite it. They just don’t always improve it. The fault often rests with me. I say things like: “That’s too broad. Be more specific. It needs to be more complex. Or subtle. Or sophisticated.” These are the ways I talk to myself about my own writing, and when my students’ writing needs help with content, with breadth of idea, I often lapse into this private language which fails to communicate to my students. They sense my sincerity and trust my desire to help them. They nod. They agree. And then they write pretty much the same stuff with the modifiers switched around.

Sometimes, though, I find the sweet spot. For years, I’ve used the NPR “This I Believe” essay for a class assignment. To begin, I send students to the website, ask them to find the directions and summarize them in their own words. Then they search through the hundreds of sample essays, find a favorite, and identify its topic, thesis and supporting details. I then play them some of my favorites, like “I Believe There is No Such Thing as Too Much Barbeque” and “I Believe in Being Cool to the Pizza Dude.” Then they write their own thesis statements. Inevitably, some students come in with things like “I believe in unconditional love” or “I believe in friendship” or “I believe in being proud of my heritage.” While these are all fine sentiments, nascent writers can struggle to develop such huge concepts well.

I walked around class, checking in book work and reading thesis statements as students worked on a grammar exercise. When I hit a thesis statement in need of revision, my sweet spot led me through variations of the following discussion:

“Have you always been proud of your heritage or is this something you’ve grown into?”

“Oh, I’ve always felt this way.”

“Do you know other people who share your heritage who aren’t as proud as you are?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Okay, so what happened in your life that made you proud of your heritage? Did someone do or say something that gave you what other people didn’t get?”

“I guess my aunts did.”

“Really? What kind of stuff would your aunts do?”

“Get together and talk, mostly.”

“Really? What did they talk about?”

“I don’t know. Nothing really. Being proud, maybe…”

“Oh, great! What would they say about being proud?”

“Gosh. I know they said stuff, but now I can’t think of anything. I don’t know.”

When I am not in the sweet spot, I literally start to sweat at this point. When I’m talking with students about their writing and they get nervous and uncomfortable instead of bubbly with ideas, I fight the desire to scream at my own inadequacies as a writing instructor. In my first years of teaching (or now if I’m really off my game), I would (gulp), suggest/dictate a thesis at this point. (Low success rate with that technique, by the way.) However, because this day I found the magical sweet spot, I did not lose faith, and I asked another question:

“Did your aunts do, or say, or give you anything that made you proud?” (In the interest of full disclosure, I will confess that I fished here for something like, “They gave me a good example of __________. I did not anticipate what the student’s answer would actually be.)

“You know, they gave me an African-American doll. I have friends who only ever had Caucasian dolls. I mean, white dolls are fine, I had those, too, but…”

“So you think it was good you had a doll that looked like you?”

“Yes! I really do…I think I believe every girl should have a doll that looks like her…”

So we turned “I believe in being proud of my heritage” into “I believe every girl should have a doll that looks like she does” in about two minutes. I’m not saying that thesis statement will change the world, but it sure as heck will lead to a more personal and specific essay from this young writer. Also, she got so excited! She felt full of ideas at this point, which was fun to see. I rushed home to record this formula: When did you start feeling this belief? + What incident happened to you that made you realize you felt this way? + No, really, what happened? + Come on, I’m sure something happened! = a more specific thesis. It may work again, or it may have just been the sweet spot. Time will tell.

I don’t always find this sweet spot. It can be elusive. It might be influenced by my brain chemistry or the lunar cycle. I love it when I find it though, so I celebrated with a grilled cheese sandwich, and I hit the sweet spot there, too. May every teacher have a sweet spot day every now and then.

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