This I Believe

For the past several months, I've been lucky to be part of the Central Virginia Writers' Project. At our two-week seminar this summer, we were asked to write our own versions of a "This I Believe" essay. Not only did this assignment give me a chance to distill some of my own beliefs about why what I do in the classroom matters, my eleventh grade team had already decided to use this prompt as our beginning essay assignment. So, I had a ready-made piece to share with my students as I asked them to share their own beliefs, and here it is for you all:




I believe we have messed up just about everything we can when it comes to public education in the United States. We expect students to learn without showing them what great magic learning can work in their own lives and the lives of others. We expect students to learn for the sake of the economy and not for the sake of themselves, and then we berate them for being so selfish as to skip class or not do their homework.


There is still some magic in elementary school. A dear friend of mine recently inspired her students to design and build their own butterfly garden when they can research, write, and sit in awe of creatures they’ve helped to save.


But the magic is seeping out of the walls of our secondary schools. Students are expected to sit still for forty-five minutes, take notes in the preferred method du jour, dutifully pass tests, and move on to the next subject when the bell rings. If they are lucky, they might get two bathroom passes a semester and a few teachers who have decided not to ride the wave of standardized test hysteria.


I believe that if we trust teachers to design project-based assessments, we will have a picture of where our students are succeeding and where they need more help. I believe if we paid teachers a wage commensurate to the many hours we work above our contracts, we wouldn’t have a shortage of bright, dedicated professionals who are respected by students, their parents, and their communities. I believe if teachers had smaller caseloads, students would receive more meaningful instruction. I believe if we created a ladder for teachers to grow professionally without leaving the classroom, we would see fewer than half of all teachers leave in their first five years of teaching.


I believe if we increased the minimum wage, we would increase student learning. I believe if showed students learning to read and read well means they could visit the moon or the ocean or the next Odyssey of the Mind field trip, we would have millions more finish college. I believe if we put students in small groups according to their interests and not any perceived ability level and turned them loose on a project, they’d learn more than they ever would in any Advanced Placement or college prep class.
I believe in the promise of public education to incorporate us all to a cause higher than ourselves. I believe our schools can be places where students delve deep into a topic and come out better learners, citizens, and people, for the experience.

There is So Much Grading

Today is Friday. On Friday, I collect journals from about half of my students. In addition to the formative assignments I have tried to review over the week to inform instruction, I will take these journals home with me. I also have some essays students have polished and turned in for a re-grade. We will talk about the philosophy of the last part later, but I find all of these assignments resting in my bag to be pedagogically useful.

But goodness there are a lot of them. I have roughly 190 pages to read this weekend. I also will chaperone prom and spend some time sprucing up my classroom and creating writing prompts and notes on semicolons for the week to come.

Then there are the non-school things I'd like to do this weekend. I hope to perfect my recipe for gluten-free, vegan pizza. I'd like to go wine tasting with some friends and celebrate another friend's successful dissertation defense. I have to get my car inspected. Atticus wants to spend some time in the woods, and so do I. These activities feel important to rejuvenate and refresh myself so I can be a good teacher to my students (well, maybe not the car inspection). But there are only so many hours in a day.

Honestly, sometimes I feel so overwhelmed by all of the grading that I dream of becoming a guidance counselor because I'd still get to help students grow academically and personally, but I wouldn't have to read as many essays. I love working with my students so much, but I am definitely lacking a system for dealing with student work efficiently. Teacher friends, how do you manage your grading load? What tips do you have for those of us still trying to figure it all out? 

Dear Ms. T. (again)

As I mentioned in my previous post, one of my students refused to write to the editor of our student newspaper. Well, she asked nicely if she could write to me instead. I decided that I am an authentic audience, and she'd still reach our objectives of letter formatting and thoughtful communication, so this is what I received:

Dear Ms. T.,

It has been a wonderful year. At the beginning of the year, I thought it was going to be an awful and long year. I thought it was going to be the worst class ever. I guess I was wrong.

I have had so much fun with you and this class. The beginning was hard for all of us: new teacher, new students, new things to get used to. I'm so happy that you're my teacher in my senior year. You've made this year awesome. You're a great person and a wonderful teacher. It's awesome to think about those moments when we all laugh and work together: great memories.

This class had good and bad times, and I think that we are here to learn how to change things about us. And we are still working on them. I think that next quarter could be better. You could make work more fun, more enjoyable but with the same rules. Maybe more strict. I want to get things done faster but in a fun way. If you could, give us more options, but you have good expectations. I know you can come up with great ideas. Love you!

Sincerely,
Student L

I think that's one for the bad day file.

Dear Editors

Hello everyone! I am still here, still teaching, and trying to still blog. The weeks after winter break proved to be some of the longest in my nascent teaching career. There's been much to do to prepare students for their standardized tests they should have passed last year. We fight a daily battle against senioritis. And, frankly, I've been enjoying the company of my students so much, I didn't have as many questions or lessons to share.

But I think this blog is probably a good thing in my teaching practice. I've missed hearing from teacher friends (and allies) all over the world. I need your ideas, support, and affirmations, so here we go again!


When the most recent edition of our student newspaper came out, the advisor asked us to encourage students to write letters to the editor. I thought this would create a great authentic audience for writing as well as prevent the monthly battle I do with the newspaper. I assigned students to read the newspaper, select an article that piqued their interest, and write to the editor about it. Some students asked if they had to do the assignment. All but one of my eighty-seven darlings went right ahead and wrote to the editor when I said yes.

Here is my favorite in response to a graphic that displayed teachers answering that question what they would do if they weren't teachers (and it's edited for privacy):

Dear Editors,

     I am a sophomore and your article about teachers was very interesting to me. It made me appreciate my teachers more than I ever did. The people that teach us now could have been anything they wanted to be. But they chose to educate us and help our knowledge grow by teaching us new information every day. I wish that the students that say they don't like their teachers will realize and appreciate that fact. Thanks to you two for taking the time to do this.

Sincerely,
Student S
    

Where I'm From

The very brilliant Linda Christensen has created a poetry-writing activity called "Where I'm From." Using George Ella Lyon's poem of a similar theme, she has students create lists of items in their home, yard, and neighborhood. She has students write down sayings they hear around their houses, food they eat with their families, and places they keep childhood memories. Doing this activity last year inspired this poem.

To get to know my new students this year, I took the activity a step further. After we made our lists and wrote our poems, I had students write their poem out on a sheet of paper with their name on the back. We then hung our poems up in the classroom. I read the poems aloud. Then, students wrote each others' names on post-it notes and put their post-its to the poem they thought corresponded to the correct classmate. Students then looked to see how well people had guessed before turning in their poems. We debriefed by talking about what we learned about each other and our community from the activity.

Students had the option to turn their poem in without hanging it up, but most chose to participate. Everyone else was really good about not judging those who chose not to participate. We're going to start blogging next quarter, and I think we might start out by doing another draft of those poems. I'm not exactly sure how to make that work for students who don't want to share their work. We did essays our name as our first workshop, so that's an option, too. What do y'all think? Any ideas on how to balance students' needs for privacy with instilling confidence in who they are?

A Quote for the Classroom

"If you've survived your childhood, you have enough material to write about for the rest of your life."

Won't this Flannery O'Connor quote make for a great poster for my new classroom? I'm so excited to get decorating in one short month!

Writing Prompts

I promised awhile back to share some of the writing prompts I picked up at the Highland Summer Writers' Conference I attended last month at Radford. That day is here! 

Both of these prompts come from the poetry week taught by Joseph Bathanti. I've found that teenagers, much like the rest of us, can be very intimidated by poetry. Having them write their own is a great way to help them access other poets. Poetry writing in the classroom will also help me achieve one of my goals for the coming year: help kids see themselves as writers who write for the sake of creativity and fun. Both of the prompts take a little explaining and have some examples, so I'm going to put them after the jump.

Looking for Cultural Relativity in All the Wrong Places

Every Monday and Friday, we started our time together in second block by writing for six minutes. I was lucky enough to get a document camera half way through the year in order to project my own writing so I could model for students just how cluttered and unfocused this warm up could be. After the six minutes were up, we shared our writing and talked about some of the issues brought up in the writing.

While I always strive to be developmentally appropriate with students, I also strive to show my authentic self in my writing with them. This means that I wrote relatively freely about my year of dating disasters and my on-going questioning about whether or not I want to have kids. One of the great joys about that eleventh grade class was that we could talk about these subjects to create a classroom community which in turn led to students really opening up in their writing (and for those of you who think this all sounds too touchy-feely to be of use, I have to say that I have observed that a student who feels valued and safe writes much better than a student who is merely trying to please a rigid requirement).

My students continually surprised me with their forward thinking on some issues that really bogged me down personally in the past year. I once wrote about a dream I had in which I decided to append my mother's unmarried name to my father's last name. I wrote about how the idea to do that stuck with me. I wondered if I should follow through since I do believe that our surnames should reflect as much equity as possible. But I wrote that I knew it would be a lot of clerical work and that people would find it really strange.

"Do it, Ms. T!" B told me enthusiastically when we got to sharing time. She told us how she planned to change her last name to her mother's when she turned eighteen to reflect the fact that her mother had worked so hard to raise her right while he father had never really been in the picture.

Another time I wrote about how I really loved kids but worried about being able to balance caring for them while also dedicating myself to improving public education. I also wrote about my worry that I, like many people of my income and education level, wouldn't marry until very late in childbearing years, rendering my balance concerns moot.

The answers to these problems were so simple to my students.

"Just adopt a baby when you're ready," K told me, "and figure out the balance as you go along." But wouldn't adopting before I had a partner make it harder to meet someone in the long run?

The classroom full of children of single parents told me I was wrong. They explained how their parents had known that a boyfriend or girlfriend was for real only when he or she was willing to really invest in their kids.

Duh, Ms. T.