education reform

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Reverend Al Sharpton and former Speaker New Gingrich were all on Meet the Press today. I agree with everything they said. Teacher evaluation needs reform, parents and communities need to be more involved, we need to be able to fire bad teachers. It's all true.

Teacher evaluation: tomorrow I will be evaluated. I will have a pre-observation meeting (only because I requested one) and my assistant principal will observe one of my lessons. These are the items she will look for: Is my aim in question format? Do I have state standards posted? Do I have student work posted on the wall? Is my Do Now under 5 minutes? Do I have a 10 minute mini-lesson? Do I have a 5 minute summary? Do I have a lesson plan? You can have all of these factors in place and students will not learn. Teaching is an art. Good teaching can look like a hundred different things. Artificial measurements on teaching detract from student learning. I don't need a mini lesson. I don't need to write out a lesson plan. Magically, I can hold that in my head. I may write down questions I know I need to ask, but how I get from point A to point B is going to vary between every period, and no plan will tell me how to navigate. Good teachers can turn on a dime when the class doesn't understand a concept. If that happens tomorrow, which it probably will, my assistant principal won't mention it. I'll jump through her arbitrary hoops and at the end of it, I'll receive a "satisfactory."

If my students who worked harder than everyone else and got better results than their classmates only got satisfactory, they'd revolt. Right now they're arguing over who got better stickers on their essays in the student work Hall of Fame, and talking big talk about their next essay that's going to make the board.

Satisfactory stickers don't exist for a reason, and they shouldn't exist for teachers either.

drama day 1

It was a bad day. It was a bad two days. I spent yesterday talking down 5 girls from fighting. They had been antagonized, one took the bait and went looking for a fight. The others went with her, some to stop her, some to back her up. They play on the team I coach. The girl who was supposedly antagonizing the fight came in with her mother to press charges. Because there were more than 3 girls positively identified, it's automatically a gang charge. Today, we had a security issue. About 30 girls were waiting outside for these 5 to come out. Deans and I were rounding girls up so they wouldn't go out to fight. Some were easy to pull from class, one was hiding. It was not how I wanted to spend the last two hours of my day. No one fought. The cops came and arrested a few of the girls outside. We had college representatives coming today to interview prospective students. This is not the type of show you want to put on for college admissions.

But this shit happens every year. I didn't react to the pregnant student whom I asked last year if she was going to graduate college or start making babies for the welfare check. The beginning of the year is over. Now it's time to make a name for yourself. Look tough. Get out of class. Something. I don't know.

So instead of going to a bar, I got two pints of Ben and Jerrys, my husband read my mind and bought two bottles of wine and I'm reading Perez Hilton to complete the brain numbing. It's not that today was so bad. It was, but not mind-splitting. It's the realization that it's only going to keep going. The other side of the school year has begun.

confession/ranting

My confession. I'm not a teacher. Well, not according to the pieces of paper I'm supposed to have. I have a transitional license, which means I'm getting my masters in education in addition to teaching everyday. So I don't have my pieces of paper, but I'm teaching, which either means I'm doing a rubbish job because this would be like a surgical intern performing brain surgery on her first round or my medical school and the whole medical training process is rubbish. It's both possibly, and some days it definitely both.

But here's the great part. As rubbish as teacher training is, sometimes I come across a nugget that even makes the other rubbish my school and district tells me to do look like total and complete rubbish. Because it's right and true and makes sense and totally confounds everything I'm told to do. So that's gotta be hard.

It's better to rant here before I try to write a paper, because ranting doesn't usually earn high marks. Not even in rubbish school. It's been 10 years and two lifetimes since my last confession. Thanks for listening.

my LC

My literacy coach of my school teaches in my room. My LC should be a mentor, providing support, materials, offering advice. This should be awesome. Right now, at this very moment, my LC is teaching the summer reading to her 11th grade class. They're half-way through one of the two assigned summer reading books. She assigns questions about each chapter at night, and then they go over the answers the next day. She reads aloud answers that they are supposed to copy down. I don't think you need to know about learning modalities to have a few questions about this practice.

It makes me feel like I should disinfect the room. When I work in here during her teaching periods, I can't look up from my desk. Afraid I won't look the flower and be the serpent underneath. (I'm teaching Macbeth with my 9th graders.)

The bell rang. It's my house now. Time to finish The Scarlet Letter. Which many students have told me is the first book they actually read in high school, and the first book they actually liked reading in high school. Good thing this is the first time teaching this curriculum and my LC was able to provide support.

I've never been good at not looking the serpent. Flowers are for wimps.

ditch day

It's ditch day for me. That's code for it's Election Day in the city and rather than sit through a day of "professional development," which conversely to it's fancy title really means being yelled at for taking days off, not following directions and not teaching our students how to write, I'm sitting at home not grinding my teeth and not developing the ticks that lead into alcoholism.

Because the fact of the matter is, I don't take days off -- well, actual teaching days that is. And I do follow the rules, unless the rules are wrong. And I categorically do teach how to write papers. So I'm at home, not getting yelled at for things I'm not doing, and I'm beginning to understand why the smartest kids often end up in detention -- because they're smarter than the system and choose not to participate in it.

So while I sit and do some actual work (ie, grade the mountain of papers I assign), I don't feel an ounce of chagrin for ditching school today. Because it's not really school today, it's teacher detention day.

If you happen to be sitting at home too, I recommend this op-ed about how to reform teacher training. It's just a hunch, but if we reformed teacher training, we may not have to remind people that you shouldn't take a personal day once a month (or once a week) when you get three months of vacation time as it is, and that in order to teach students how to write, you're probably going to have to assign papers and return them in a timely manner with constructive feedback. Just a thought. But what do I know? I ditch school.

one brain cell at a time

It's a good thing no one reads this thing, or they would worry that I'd disappear in between sparsely spaced posts. Turns out I don't have a lot of time to write about teaching because I'm teaching all the time. Well, yeah. Kinda. Let me explain.

Anyone who calls a teacher a friend knows that teaching is not an 8-3 job. It's a 7-4 job if you want to not suck horrendously, and a 7-5 job to do well, with another hour once you get home as an added bonus. But there's this vampire-zombie-parasitic-takeover-your-whole-brain thing that teaching does to its fresh cohorts that I think may be slightly unique to the job. Because if you don't do well, you don't just have a bad day, you have a mind and body shit fest that you can't stop. And the amount of time you put in before hand is directly related to how your day goes. Try imaging a bad day when you're in charge of managing 30 people. Now make those 30 people teenagers. Now multiple that times 5. Maybe you get the idea.

As soon as I wake up in the morning, I am in zombie mode. I am counting down minutes until I have to leave to get to the subway. I'm planning how many pages I can review on the train, how much coffee I can drink and if I need to stop by Starbucks halfway to school to reload, because really, I really would rather spend a day with a real zombie than a day at school without at least one cup of coffee in the morning and another caffeine jolt in the afternoon. And that's the thing. The brain takeover doesn't stop until I leave to go home. Every minute I am at school, my brain is working on my job. I don't stop for 5 minutes to check my personal email, unless it's work related. I don't think about my husband or my family. Sometimes when I put a date on the board at the beginning of the day I will remember it's someone's birthday (like today, Happy Birthday Michael!), but the odds of me remembering later in the day to call are a whole other story. And it feels totally guilty. Like I should spend a few minutes thinking about loved ones or anything else in the entire world besides my job for at least a freaking minute or two between the hours of 6am and 4pm. But it just doesn't happen.

It used to be like this non-stop when I first started. Didn't matter where I was, when I was, I was thinking about teaching. There is nothing that spoils a Valentine's more when you haven't had time to think about it in the slightest and you give your boyfriend a random book when he put together a slide show of your favorite pictures and theme song from the movie you saw on your first date. Your brain is always thinking about how to make those teaching periods better because when they suck, as I think I have mentioned, it's like being beat up with a heavy wooden bat (or what I imagine such brutality would feel like).

I unplug my brain now, but that doesn't make me a better person. Ok, I'm a better wife. I'm a better dog owner. But I'm not a better friend, daughter or sister. Because I could call my mom back, but I'd just get tired. I could be conserving energy for tomorrow. And I could check my email and start working on that bs masters assignment, but I'd just get mad about how inadequate the training is and how unrelated it is to my actual job and I'm lose energy. Because that's the other body-takeover factor. It turns out to not have 34 seventeen-year-olds revolt and turn your life into actual living hell five times a day, you have to expend a lot of energy. Double-header Broadway show, staring role, name in the big lights kind of thing. You have to be bigger than they are. And they eat sugar for breakfast. So it's a losing battle. Unless you pound your home-made mug of coffee in the 8 minute train ride and 1.5 minute walk to Starbucks to refill. And if you think I don't know those times exactly you're out of your mind.

The zombies have won. I am a teacher.

the more you care...

Teaching is a really easy job if you don't actually teach. You come to work at 8, you pass out worksheets, if you have good management, you don't have to yell. You can even catch up on your crossword puzzle skills. You have about 2.5 hours to play with during your day when you're not teaching. You go home at 3, in time to see Oprah. And you don't have anything to do when you go home because there's nothing to grade because you don't actually teach anything. This is the life of a gym teacher and unfortunately, many other subject teachers. Gym teachers make the same amount of money as math teachers. Or English teachers who assign an insane amount of work because clearly, no other English teacher has before and your kids can't write an essay to save their life.

The more you care, the more you teach, the harder your life is. The two and a half hours of your free periods are eaten away by making photo copies, planning lessons or grading. You got to work at least an hour early, but some days you have to get there two hours early. And forget about leaving at 3. It's a good day if you leave by 5, because there's still so much to grade and students need extra help after school when you teach a lot.

I share my room with another teacher. She teaches in my room two periods a day. Prior to this year, she has only worked as a literacy coach and has not been inside the classroom. At a department meeting this week, we were supposed to discuss intervention strategies for our lower level students. I said that I couldn't distinguish the bottom third in terms of writing because they are all so deficient. I said I was assigning a two page essay every week. The literacy coach said, "If you don't mind my asking, how will you grade all those papers?"

Exactly. That's the job. It's work. It's a 7-5 plus another hour or two at home job. You work as much as you care. I don't have to assign a paper every week. I could assign work and never grade it (that's the other route teachers go). But I care and they're taking the Regents in January. So I work. A lot. That's the job. That's teaching.