Thursday, September 24, 2009

worlds collide

I wish these nuggets happened once a day, but post-worthy things all seem to happen at once.

Husband came home today. He had to go to a board meeting with his boss. His boss is bad at running the company. Husband had to defend a list of 15 business proposals that he did not create. The board, who has very little involvement in the day-to-day running of the company and thinks management is putting people on the spot four times a year, grilled husband. I told his this is what education administrators are like.

I have a few kids who got switched out of one of my English classes after three weeks into school. They went to the programming office to try to get switched back; it wouldn't be difficult. They're in another English class the same period and I have room in my class. The switch was arbitrary. The programming office told them they weren't making any more changes. They tried to tell the office that this was the first time they had been excited about English class, and that this was the first time they had been challenged in English class.

The programming office wouldn't switch them back. I told them to keep fighting. I told them I taught grammar that day in a British accent. Because really, grammar is so boring, you need to do something. I do cartoons for some grammar, but a proper British accent came to me first period, so I ran with it all day. They were mad they missed it and asked for an example of my accent. Now I was laughing and I couldn't get myself to do it. I'm much better in front of a full house than a private gig.

Schools are run by people out of touch with the day-to-day business of the classroom. A place where it is totally logical to code switch from Mrs. Doubtfire and Mrs. H to explain a grammar idea. Administrators wouldn't understand. They just tell me to stop sending kids to the programming office and ask if the state standards are posted on my blackboard.

God forbid a student should want to be in a class. How (please imagine Mrs. Doubtfire) hawrid.

Monday, September 21, 2009

education vs. teaching

I work with a guy who sums up working in schools this way: there's the line for teaching and there's the line for education.

There's a long line for the education group. It has a higher salary. You get more degrees and feel better about yourself. You actually end up working less. Maybe if you're really good, you right a book and do conferences.

The line for teaching is pretty lacking. It's so lacking we've come up with horrendous programs that put inexperienced, unprepared, doomed for failure novices into the classroom to plug the holes of the failing apart dam that is American public education. No one will stay, (they've quit, been put in the rubber room or have switched to the education line) so we con people into believing they can change the world.

The other issue (why education is a crumbling dam and not say, the Great Wall of China) is that you can be in the teaching line and actually do very little teaching, i.e. work. You can be a teacher and get away with doing practically nothing. It's a very easy job if you don't assign work. It's 8-3pm and you get lots of vacation time. But if you do work, and you assign work, it becomes very difficult very quickly. You assign essays and now you have 100 essays to grade. And no one else has ever assigned your students an essay before so they're horrendous. It's remarkably easy to say, "This is more than one person should have to deal with. This is the kids' fault, their parents' fault, their prior teachers' fault, the school's fault. Let's just get through today."

Or you say. "Wow, they don't know their from there and write an essay as though they're talking on the phone." Except no one talks on the phone anymore, they text, so you actually have a kid write "u" in an essay and you begin to worry about the end of the world. And you get over the sinking feeling that they may never get better because they're starting so low, but you put your head down, and try to teach.

And you end up holding a burial ceremony, complete with a tombstone (ok, a picture of a tombstone you drew on poster paper) and you hum a funeral song (which you tell them is called a dirge), and you say a little eulogy for all the awful words that they have used in their papers and you write these words (such as, big, thing, like and stuff)on the tombstones and offer suggestions for rephrasing these words. And you ask if anyone else would like to share a few words before you cover the coffin, and your students have been laughing at you the whole time because you actually hummed a funeral song (which now they know is called a dirge and they will never forget, even on the SAT) and marched around looking solemn, and plus there's a poster of a tombstone in the room and that's a little weird, but hey, that's teaching.

So you go home, take their essays with you and you start grading. Because teaching, real teaching, is a lot of work. It is not an 8-3 job. Mine is a 7-4 at school job, and a 6-8 at home job, and there's always something else I could be doing. I'm never not thinking about teaching. When my dad used to be quiet at the dinner table and his head was clearly somewhere else, I now know where it was. When you work hard at your job, your head is always there. Mine is. I try to pull it back, for my husband, for my dogs and for myself every once in a while, but even that is hard. My only friends are my teacher friends really. I don't talk to my family a whole lot, although I'm trying to more. It's hard to maintain relationships when your head is elsewhere. So I focus on my husband and my dogs. My life is small and focused.

But my kids know what a dirge is, and if you give me another week, they'll be able to write an essay.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

It's been a busy week. It's back to school, which for me, means going to sleep thinking about the next day, waking up far too early and not being able to sleep and waking up lesson planning and hearing your opening day speech in your head. When anything infiltrates your brain to this extent, it is cause for concern.

Here's my brief take on the week.

Teachers take many approaches to the first day. Some don't talk at all, some put up a military front. Any good teacher will teach their rules as a given, but style and message can be worlds apart even though they're across the hall from one another.

I sat on top of my table cross-legged and told them if they needed to go the bathroom, they should go themselves.

Maybe what I said didn't strike a chord. Let me devolve. The emphasis in many schools is order and silence. Having students line up silently outside your door before allowing them in is not unusual. Students are expected to enter quietly, take out their notebooks immediately and get to work immediately. Many tell students to not even bother asking to go to the bathroom during their class. In many classes, students don't have the opportunity to talk at all. They are supposed to sit straight, do the Do Now, not ask questions. The administration wants teachers to limit the amount of getting up and walking around because students will bump into one another. They're treated as though they can't be trusted to talk, walk or sit on their own without guidance.

So I tell my students, there are things that bother me, not doing homework, and not talking during the Do Now, mostly because I have to mentally decompress between periods and figure out where I am. But that's kind of it. I discourage shouting out during class discussion, but I also know when you're talking about heated topics, sometimes it can't be helped. And I told them, that if they need to go to the bathroom, they should go. One person at a time, sign out, take the pass, don't take more than 5 minutes. Don't go during the first 10 and lat 10 minutes of class because those are the school rules. But otherwise, police yourselves. Abuse the privilege, and you'll have to ask permission. And I was sitting on my table when I told them.

So it's a little radical. Not for every school. But for mine at least, and I'm guessing a few others. We'll just have to see how they respond to being treated like adults.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

crawling out from teddy bears

After three days of sorting, hauling, throwing and (insert violent, action-packed verb here) old crazy hoarding lady's former classroom, I have found mine underneath the stolen, mice-dropping strewn, five years of dust laden, t-shirt covered, if for lack of a better phrase, insane hot mess. My assistant principal came in to help me for about 10 whole minutes, and spent part of the timing wondering out loud how it got like this? (Answer, she may have been crazy, but you let her express her craziness out loud in this room.

But here's the good part. For those of you who know, cough, competent literary coaches, you'll understand.

My literary coach is teaching two periods of 11th grade English in my room. (And it is mine, I found it under the rubble.) I am also teaching 11th grade English. As I disentangled the books in the room, I pulled aside the ones I wanted to use (aka, Huck Finn, Awakening, 451, Gatsby, etc.). I asked her what books she wanted to use. She said, "Oh, just the Regents prep books, grammar text book, vocabulary workbook and World Literature textbook."

[It should be noted that in a lengthy series of meetings at the end of last year, meetings in which she was a participant, the entire English department agreed on reading lists and curriculum mapping for each grade, and decided 10th grade would be World Literature and 11th grade would be American literature.]

When I reminded her that 11th grade was American literature and not World literature, she sounded confused, and said she didn't remember that, and that she'd have to ask the Assistant Principal. She pulled out a course syllabus from last year that outlined the fact that 11th grade would have World literature textbooks. I said, since all the 11th grade teachers taught American literature last year, that syllabus is wrong.

It sounds minute, it sounds so unworthy of spending 15 minutes mentally regurgitating the whole brief episode here. But imagine it this way. Imagine you work for American Express. Imagine that this whole episode took place, but in a fancy corporate America conference room and not in the shambles of an old crazy lady's classroom formerly decorated with teddy bears. Maybe gross incompetence happens in corporate America. It most likely has on an astronomical scale given the economy. But was the conference room covered in teddy bears? Did the CEO walk by the conference room decorated with teddy bears and say hey, kinda cooky, but we'll let it slide?

No.

Thank goodness for public education to keep the craziness alive and well.

Welcome to the rabbit hole.