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High school English teacher Fred the Fish delves into a critical issue in education policy:
Is anyone else distracted by the colored rubber bands on your students' braces? I have trouble concentrating when they talk. I think I might have a seizure as the colors flash by.
We knew that schools were having a tough time hanging on to young teachers, but in a thoughful post on the difficulties of new educators, Mr. Lawrence shows just how desperate the situation can be:
I know one young teacher (23?) who's actually trying to get pregnant just so she can get some time off. I know another who I see around town—and gives me plenty of information—and is trying to get into grad. school full-time just so she can quit teaching.
Mr. Lawrence believes that part of the reason for young teachers’ unhappiness is that they "leave college with an idealized vision of the classroom"—a surefire recipe for disillusionment. He postulates that it’s much better to go in, like he did, "with a kind of bemused detachment."
The question is how to work "bemused detachment" into the ed school curriculum.
"They begin returning in October," high school teacher Erica Jacobs writes. The swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano? No, she's talking about former students.
They are returning graduates of high school, walking the halls in search of former teachers, former classrooms, former teammates, and possibly in search of the ghosts of their former selves.
Sometimes they are the class stars with 4.0 GPA’s and the lead in the spring musical. But more often than not, they are the disaffected ones who liked your class okay, but hated school in general, and forgot to turn in assignments. Or slept through class. Or even stayed home on test days... They were a reminder to me that high school does not provide “the best years of your life” to adolescents. Even the best high school is a miserable place where cliques make or break self-esteem, where administrators check for cell phone use and midriff exposure, and where sleep-deprived students move through the day pretending everything’s fine... It takes only a few months of college for all that pretense to fall away, and then---miraculously---students often find themselves interested in what they’re studying. And so they return, measuring their newly acquired wisdom against their former selves.
In a moving post, TMAO, a junior high teacher in California, reflects on hearing that a former student of his is in jail after a stabbing incident. The news has hit him hard since he had watched this particular student go from resistance and failure to academic success in his class. Now his faith in the power of education is shaken:
We failed this kid. We have enjoyed unprecedented success on my campus, and made great strides, but we failed this kid. Not in the way that speaks of falling through the cracks, or being allowed to not-learn. Somehow we failed him in a way that makes everything we do seem paltry and frail. He met our expectations, or enough of them that pretty much no one would stand up and say we gotta be doing more, we can't lose this kid. But we did. He took what we offered, owned it, and it wasn't enough. It wasn't enough. Somewhere people are arguing about benefits packages and school choice and facilities agreements and yard duty, and at the fundamental level, it wasn't enough. It wasn't enough.
It's interesting how something can be both disheartening and inspiring at the same time. (Come to think of it, perhaps that's a lot like teaching in general.) In any case, we think it’s safe to say that, based on this, TMAO hasn’t failed anyone.
JHS Teacher, in her 9th year teaching -- you guessed it -- junior high school in California, discusses maintaining the difficult balance between having the freedom to teach the way you want to and ensuring every kid learns what they need to learn.
What we all but Ms. G. decided was that no matter how we teach Response to Literature, or Literary Devices or whatever, we will use the short, multiple choice quiz from the Holt book for each section... It's not a bad way to make sure we are all teaching the same thing, even if we do go about it in different ways.
Ms. G. is having none of it. "I teach Response to Literature" all the time. I don't need to do an assignment from the book or give them a test to know what I'm teaching."
There is a good thing in all of this, and that's making sure that no matter which teacher a student has, no matter what texts are used, we as teachers can cover specific standards, using the same language in each of our classrooms, and use these little 20 minute quizzes to inform our teaching.
Problem is, it's not enough for the top brass, and asking too much of our creative "don't fence me in I'll do it my own way" teachers.
Since so many teaching blogs are filled to overflowing with (valid) gripes about administrators, it was refreshing to see Mr. AB, a Teach for America educator from California, lavish what sounds like equally well-deserved praise on his principal.
R--- is an almost daily helping presence in my practice: mediating conferences with behavior problems, making parent phone calls in Spanish, translating letters home, providing needed materials, observing in and offering constructive feedback on my classroom. It wasn’t until I discussed R--- with my mother and with other teachers that I realized how exceptional he is in this respect. My first year, he was an almost daily presence in my class, even after it became clear that I was not among the teachers most in need of his intervention. In particular, his help was invaluable as I struggled with an Emotionally Disturbed girl last year. He mediated conferences, made phone calls, observed in class, or provided the girl with a time-out at least two or three times a week for the entire year.
Along with being supportive, Mr. AB gives his principal high marks for allowing teachers flexibility in what they teach, his willingness to solicit teacher input, and his ability to validate their efforts. Small wonder, then, that the principal will henceforth be known, at least on Mr. AB's blog, simply as "the Man."
Hobo Teacher writes of spotting someone he takes to be a new or soon-to-be-teacher at a car dealership (where he had gone not to buy a car but to partake of the free drinks and cookies and, apparently, grade papers). How did he know she was new to teaching? Easy:
Besides looking rested, she was reading a textbook about teaching methods. As if there is a recipe. You're teaching, not making a quiche. How do these books get written? After a teacher gets fed up and quits, do they go and write a book about how they thought it would be?
Let’s just hope this guy's not a new-teacher mentor at his school. On second thought, maybe he should be. ...
By the way, in the interests of journalistic integrity, we should mention we’re not quite sure what to make of Hobo Teacher. The banner on his blog claims he is homeless, but the site indicates elsewhere that this a kind of metaphor. (As a teacher, he sees his "home less." Get it?) There also seem to be three different teachers involved in the site. So, is HT supposed to be a composite portrait? A fictional creation? A kind of Everyman of teaching? In any case, he’s funny.
Accident-prone elementary teacher Pigs describes her latest classroom mishap.
I was conferencing with a student about their writing, and I tend to abuse personal space when kids are at my table. Their little story was really quite amusing, and I wanted to laugh to demonstrate my enjoyment of their craft. Since it was a quiet writing time in my class I tactfully kept my mouth closed and did the church laugh. You know, the slight blowing of air through the nose whilst smiling with mouth? Yeah. Well, I puffed a dry little crusty right onto their paper.
That's right. I shot a booger on a kid's composition. Try to play that one off. Bygones.
Thanks for sharing, Pigs.
Noting the persistence of racially tinged incidents at his school, A History Teacher talks about what he's tried to do in his classroom.
Tolerance is an ongoing theme all year long, but in both my courses I spend a considerable amount of time in one unit exploring this issue. In U.S. History it comes during the Civil Rights unit and in World History it takes place in my Holocaust unit. A couple years ago, to my amazement, I actually had a student argue that the facts I was teaching regarding the Holocaust were wrong. He claimed the Holocaust was an exaggerated event coordinated by Jewish leaders for financial gain. He brought up several points, each of which I was able to dismiss through a thorough knowledge of the subject and the denial/revisionist arguments. Strangely, I actually had a decent rapport with the student, even after calling people who believe in this sort of ideology to be fundamentally un-American (I added a word or two to emphasize my point). He later argued that others stereotyped him for having certain beliefs and a shaved head, he was just doing the same thing they were....
We are on the front lines of this battle. We have to fight traditions, cultures, parents, friends, and stereotypes. We do it through example and through our lesson plans. Can we win? I think I convinced that student the Holocaust did occur, but does he still hold his racist beliefs? Probably.
Ms. Frizzle shares a high point from a recent professional development day at New York's American Museum of Natural History:
The highlight of the morning and perhaps the whole day was when astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson came out to say hello to all of us. He is everything I need my children to know about: an African-American scientist, a product of the NYC public schools, charming, a good speaker, a populizer of science, funny. I think I may invite him to be a science expo judge. He will probably say no, but maybe he will know of other people who are less famous and, therefore, have more time to spend visiting schools. Then again, you never know. The one thing I have learned is that people find it hard to say no to helping teachers, if you just ask them the right way.
Of course, after describing this highly validating moment, Ms. Frizzle goes on to explain what she learned next: an asteriod that will pass very near the Earth in 2029 could very well pulverize the Pacific Ocean the next time its orbit brings it our way. Kind of puts the professional development thing into perspective, doesn't it?
Teacher Magazine blogger Hanne Denney writes of preparing for a formal classroom observation by her principal. She says experience has taught her not to be too sensitive about criticism, but still, she worries that things could go awry:
I won’t be offended if she proffers criticism, unless it is something beyond my control. Like the fact that things don’t stay plugged in the wall, that the room is incredibly hot and lacks ventilation, that there are two students with emotional challenges that sometimes need breaks and diversions, or that the student who’s been absent for a week may come and won’t have a clue what we’re doing.
Considering that Hanne is among the most positive of people, it’s notable--or maybe the word is scary--how quickly that list of potential events beyond the teacher’s control seems to grow.
Administrators sometimes like to call bits and pieces of documented student work "artifacts," presumably because they provide direct evidence that their kids are learning. But at Ms. Smlph's school, the name fits because they're apparently dug up at the last minute.
At the end of the meeting, our school's three administrators, one of whom was only a PE teacher two weeks ago, stood up and plead for "artifacts," useless pieces of evidence they could stuff into a binder to present to the school district. It turns out this binder was supposed to be at the office at noon yesterday, and by the time the meeting had ended, it was 4pm. The administrators were so flustered, running around like chickens with their heads cut off, scrambling for data, papers, and anything that might show teachers at our school are actually doing something.
It was hilarious to see all of this going on out in the open instead of behind closed doors.
As the handwringing over the New York City teachers contract continues, NYC Educator offers up a, shall we say, modest proposal. Suffice it to say that it has something to do with bringing some legitimate businessmen into the discussion.
Naturally, I abhor violence. But why can't we have a mobbed-up union boss? And please don't lecture me about discrimination, because mobs now come from all over...
Screw the cutesy television commercials that say how hard we work and how unappreciated we are. They cost us bazillions in dues, and just make the Daily News that much more vicious when decrying the perfidy of teachers....
I ask you--is it too much to ask the forces of corruption to align themselves with us for a change?
Former Massachusetts teacher Diane Weir reacts to news of a high school student with a GPA somewhere north of 4.0 being turned away from taking a fourth AP class out of concern that she might be taking on too much.
I realize that not all students could maintain such a high GPA with that sort of workload, but no student should be denied the chance to try. We wouldn't tell the athletes that they couldn't play a sport each season, even if we knew that they wouldn't play each equally well. Why then would we limit the scholars from challenging themsleves? ... So, instead of taking an Economics class, she is going to the movies with friends. Tell me, if given the chance to redo your high school years, which would you have chosen? According to a survey in USA Today, it would seem that today's students would opt for Economics.
Wow, high school has changed.
(On a side note, Weir is now a school committee member in Westford, Mass. Not only is it unusual to find a local public education official who runs a personal blog, but she's gone so far as to include her voting record and a justification for taking a stand against a recent teacher contract. Wonder if other school board members will follow suit.)
High school English teacher Erica Jacobs admits that she often believes she knows exactly what each student in her class is thinking. And every year, all it takes is a simple writing assignment -- to write an Hamletesque soliloquy that answers the question "who are you?" -- to remind her it's not true.
What I find each year is that the adolescents who seem predictable in their yearning for independence and longing to burst free from the constraints of class, homework, high school, and home, are also longing to break from the constraint of conformity.
When I read their soliloquies aloud in class, anonymously, students are surprised that others are “deep” and thoughtful. They’ve been hiding these introspective qualities for five years, and it’s a shock to know everyone else has been doing the same.
I find their words deeply moving... Every October, this assignment is a reminder that all my students are complicated, thoughtful, and very different from their projected façades.
An infinite number of monkeys might be able to come up with Hamlet's soliloquy, as the old joke goes, but it's nice to know that just a roomful of high schoolers can reaffirm a teacher's faith in her kids.
Ms. Cornelius weighs in on Proposition 74, the controversial ballot measure in California that would lengthen teachers’ probationary period from two years to five and generally make it easier for schools to fire ineffective teachers. In her view, the measure avoids the real problems (and the real culprits):
Incompetent teachers should be fired. ... But increasing the lagtime for tenure is only one tiny piece of the puzzle. Unspoken is the fact that those [incompentent] teachers were hired by someone, observed by someone (supposedly), and rehired by someone. Bad teachers do not pop out of nowhere. I don't see laws addressing these facts. Instead, I see yet another attempt to demonize teachers, while leaving untouched the larger issue of making teaching an honored and valued profession.
Californians will vote on Prop. 74 as part of a special election on November 8.
P.S. Whatever you think of Ms. C's thoughts on Prop. 74, you have to love her bio: "high school teacher, guitar goddess, black belt, softball jockette, working mom, exhausted wife, dutiful daughter, bibliophile, autodidact, and terrible housekeeper."
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