Certifiable?

I’m done. Certified, stick a fork in me, mail that sucker off with every kind of insurance the post office has to offer… Finito. If I were a more high tech guy, this entry would merely consist of a grainy self-portrait taken at arm’s length with my cell phone camera, depicting a haggard shell of a man clutching a blue box packing-taped to oblivion. And a sound file with the Hallelujah chorus.

I will not even try, at this moment, to assess the long-term impact of this process on my teaching. For now, I simply want to reclaim my life. I started Wednesday night, cracking a second beer after the boys went to bed… because I could. Because there was no nagging voice in the back of my head saying, You really should go down to the computer to type up the cover pages for the Entry Three evidence.

It will be a while before the rest of me thaws. I did a little more healing Friday, allowing my Humanities classes to throw a celebration of the “BTB’s” (Big Travel Books) we’d been reading. No student achievement in sight, but there was a side-splitting skit depicting a day in the life of a TJ kid (nine rows of seats during the class on Dante’s Inferno; in English with Gulliver a spelling test with the first word, “Houyhnhnms”).

Refreshments included deviled eggs (har, har) and sugar cookies shaped like the gold coins Candide clinked in El Dorado. After that, we had a full slate of entertainment including a computerized game of “Whack a Yahoo” on the whiteboard and a Canterbury Tales-style tale-telling contest that required students to act out one-minute fairy tales. Oh yes, and there was the baroque quartet’s happy birthday serenade to my Hum partner Jen, who is marking a quarter century by hosting a Model UN Conference this weekend.

The next step? Make it one more week to spring break, when I can do the house chores I’ve been putting off for six months. Maybe steal a day to go fishing. Try not to worry about the grades due when we get back. Give my wife a break by watching the two-year old. Lots of baby steps.

Then? After tending to home and hearth, reconnecting with the family, doing some me-time… what’s next, you ask?

Not yet, friend, I reply, feebly holding up a hand.
Please. Just let me feel the sun.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 8:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

I took another day off from actual teaching last week to work on the portfolio, and it is nearly in finished form. By “almost” I mean all the entries are in individual manila folders with a litter of yellow sticky notes attached to parts that need attention. I am now in the process of un-stickying. When it’s all sticky-free I can box, send, and drink.

An unexpected favorite part was drawing diagrams of the classrooms to go with the video tapes. A part I still haven’t done yet is to attach typed descriptions to the evidence (assignment sheets, student papers) for the videotaped entries.

In neatening up these last minute details, it became apparent that the bible itself is inconsistent. In more than one instance, two sets of directions from different parts of the bible offer incompatible suggestions about how to properly submit the work.

“Final Inventory” cover sheets are provided for each entry. They are schematic drawings of big stacks of paper, showing what order things go in and where to put the paper clips. Unfortunately, these final inventory cover sheets DO NOT MATCH the exhaustive directions given in earlier sections of the bible. I get the distinct feeling that the bible has been revised and these diagrams represent earlier versions of the portfolio with, in some cases, significantly different requirements from those that exist now.

For example, the Entry 1 Final Inventory suggests that there are three paper-clipped bundles after the written commentary: Assignment #1 with response from Student A and then Student B; Assignment #2 with the same; and Assignment #3, ditto.

In fact, this entry as currently devised calls for four assignments per student, not three, and these don’t even have to be the same assignments. In the bible (EA/ELA 2006 pp108-9), the order suggested under “For Your Entry 1 Envelope” is first a packet with four assignments for Student A, and then a packet for Student B with four assignments.

This is not an isolated incident. Every one of the Final Inventory cover sheets attached in a helpful appendix of forms at your fingertips contains significant inaccuracies, as compared to the version of the entry given in the bible proper. For Entry 2, for example, the Final Inventory suggests that the written commentary can be 12 pages and allows for 6 pages of attached instructional material. The Bible (pp 117-19) clearly states that there can only be 11 and 3 pages, respectively. In fact, the directions include stern language: “If you submit a longer Written Commentary, only the first 11 pages will be read and scored” (boldface theirs).

If, therefore, a candidate were hapless enough to only use the cover sheets from the appendix as a guide, that candidate would fail. However, in a masterful Catch-22, even candidates like me who recognize the discrepancies are required to sign and submit the (incorrect) Final Inventory cover sheets in a “Forms” envelope, representing cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die sincerity that we have not only assembled our portfolio completely according to directions but checked it twice.

Something else about portfolio assembly that bugged me was the dehumanizing aspect of putting a number and a bar code on everything, instead of my name. I appreciate the purpose of anonymity, but the act of actually whiting out one’s own name on emails that show how your dialogue with a parent has changed a kid’s life for the better underscores the irony that these entries are at the same time drenched in blood, sweat and tears, yet devoid of voice and personal identifying characteristics.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 5:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Saturday
Forgot I signed up for a conference at GMU and almost don't go (the looming portfolio deadline is a handy excuse). I compromise and just hit the keynote speaker, Kelly Gallagher, super teacher and author of Deeper Reading and Challenging Adolescent Writers. He wears a black sweater, has intense blue eyes, and focuses like a laser on learning. Hearing him is a shot in the arm, as these things are, once one drags one’s butt to them. His ideas echo in my head all week.

Sunday
Start writing Entry 1 in the morning and don’t stop until four in the afternoon. Wife and kids disappear for a trip to the petting farm and then a birthday party. Note to self: thank wife for disappearing. During a break, publish on the blog my response to three reflective questions from last support class. Don’t bother to edit out the snark. Decide to get a sub for Monday. Knock out a quick lesson plan before bed.

Monday
It’s me and Entry 1. Mano a mano. Chain myself to the computer while wife manages to disappear again, this time to a skating rink and pizza lunch. Entry balloons to about 18 pages by mid morning. I lay it out on the table and ruthlessly red-pen: 1 page and 8 lines of analysis alloted per piece of student work. As I’m writing, I think about Kelly’s ideas from the conference. Could I have made this kid learn better by giving more feedback in process? At last, I email the entry to my reader, Stephanie.

Tuesday
Instead of writing about teaching, I decide to actually do it. Go to school, do a lesson helping freshmen mine their writer’s notebooks for topics for our next assignment, an attempt to write “creative nonfiction” a la the “storm books” we’ve been reading (The Perfect Storm or Isaac’s Storm). Teaching is so fun, I decide to do it again that night: at NOVA, we work on how to integrate quotes into our writing. Students type examples on the computer, we shine it on the big screen and edit live.

Wednesday
Back at school. My tenth graders present charts comparing one of four “BTB’s” (Big Travel Books) they’ve just finished reading: The Inferno, Canterbury Tales, Gulliver’s Travels or Candide. A characteristic of my teaching I forgot to add to the reflection for Entry 1: snappy assignment titles. During the day, I click over to Certifiable, and notice that the response to last post was deafening. I read emails from various superteachers on the TLN listserv, and feel guilty about the snark. I’m saved by an email from Stephanie. She likes Entry 1.

Thursday
A late opening! Should I: a) dive back into another entry, b) knock out the blog post for this week, c) head into school early and do some power grading, or d) head back up to bed for an hour. Taking the middle road, I choose b, but what to write about? What have I done this week? It’s a blur. Oh yea, there was that conference on Saturday. I should write about that...

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)