hipteacher

hello Korea!

I have two new students from Korea in my ninth grade class. One speaks no English whatsoever. The other can hold a basic conversation. They both seem like very good students and have willing attitudes. They both have cute pencil cases, very organized notebooks filled with my notes and the Korean translations, and brightly colored, nifty-looking translators.*   But now what to do?

They are both getting one-on-one ESL tutoring after school several times a week, which is great, but I teach at this sort of college-prep, wannabe pretentious private school that often gets college level work out of its freshman class.  I started the semester with the Fagles translation of the Odyssey, and the kids are reading one or two books a night. This is faster than I would like to go, but I also have to teach three plays and poetry this semester. (My school is talkin’ "depth and not breadth," but they’re not quite ready to do the walkin'). So what do I do with my two new friends to make my class fair and useful to them?

I asked my head last semester what I should do for "Darren," the first of my Korean arrivals, when final time came around. He suggested that I give Darren a totally new story to read along with reading comprehension questions and an essay.  That seemed insane to me. The kid needs to use his translator when I say, “Good morning!” So instead, I had him read and write chapter summaries of most of "Lord of the Flies," which took the whole quarter. He answered some short answer questions about characterization and symbols in the novel, and then he wrote an essay. I gave him the final a few days before the test so that he could make sure he understood the directions.  His answers were simple but good, and I was happy with the result.

But the Odyssey? And Henry IV, Part 1?   

Friday, my brand new student, “Edward”, who speaks a good bit more English, tried to take a reading quiz along with the rest of the class about the Cyclops book, but he wouldn't turn it in. I smiled and promised that I wouldn't grade it; I just wanted to know where he was so I could help him. He said he was sorry, but would not give me his paper. He was quite adamant about it. It was sort of embarrassing for both of us in front of the whole class, so I let it go. He came the today day to apologize to me, which was very sweet, but he still wouldn’t let me see his paper.

I think he wants to make sure his work is perfect, and he doesn’t want to show me imperfect work. But I want to help him and need to know how much of the reading he understands so I can decide if it is appropriate reading for him at all.

I think I am going to find out who the ESL tutor is and contact her to see if she can give me some advice.

*and brand new “American” names. Why? I admit the Korean names are a little challenging to pronounce at first, but that’s my challenge. I think losing your name is pretty big deal.

tagging at random

I got tagged by bellringers.

The rules are:

• Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
• Share 7 random and or weird things about yourself.
• Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
• Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

I'm feeling sort of random tonight, so random info seems appropriate.

1. my favorite color is green
2. i have only celebrated christmas about five times in my whole life and don't know any of the words to christmas songs
3. there is a warrant out for my arrest in a very small town that i've never been to, so someone is out there running around trying to be me.
4. i just moved next door to the school where i teach to a house owned by my school. they take my rent out of my paycheck.
5. my granny was a paranoid schizophrenic, and she kept journals for fifty years which i am in the process of transcribing and hopefully turning into a book one day
6. i wish i could sing, but i really, really can't
7. is my favorite number

i'm not going to tag anyone (see nyc educator). i'm also not very good at following rules.

note-to-self: consider this your toe in the water. it's time to jump in and make regular posts. do it.

What's In It For You?

Survey Time!

Next week I am going to give a presentation about blogging at a conference. I want to talk about why teachers blog, not for their students or classes, but for their own personal and professional growth.

I would LOVE it if you answered the following questions in a comment:

1. Why did you start blogging?
2. What do you blog about primarily?
3. Professionally, what do you get out of blogging?
4. Personally, what do you get out of blogging?
5. What advice would you give to new blogging teachers?

I'm going to make a handy dandy Power Point presentation incorporating the responses I receive and post it on the blog when I am finished for anyone that is interested.

Thank you in advance!!!

I'm tagging a few people, but I'd love to hear from everyone...
2 Cents Worth
Hedgetoad
huffenglish
It's Not All Flowers and Sausages
Mary's Madness
Mentor Texts...
NYC Educator
Ramblin' Educat
Ms. Frizzle
Teaching (smarter)
Life After the Rubber Room
Closing the Gap in NYC
Weblogg-ed

disconnect

As an extra credit question on today's reading quiz on a certain book (my kids are blogging about it, and they don't need to find this blog--so I'll err on the side of extreme caution), I asked them to tell me the setting, time and place. Most got it right, Brooklyn in the early 1900s. Some even got it more specific, from 1902-1919.

But then, as an extra credit bit, I asked what the librarian keeps on her desk. The answer should have been something about seasonal flowers, but I got four children that said "a computer."

I guess technology has been integrated to the point that they can't imagine life ever existed without it.

And their teacher, who is only about fifteen years older than them, can vividly remember getting her first Apple IIc and Apple IIe.

Maybe I'm just young, but that seems like some fast moving.

.........

This week's vocabulary words came from the lyrics on Andrew Bird's latest album Armchair Apocrypha. I was listening to the album on a car trip this weekend, and often I was entraced by Bird's word choice: premonition, apropos, palindromes, mitosis, quantify, malcontent, osmosis, wrought, pratfalls, morbid, elation, maelstroms, pundit, etc. I make a big deal about learning vocab that they encounter in real life, and usually they pick the words, but this week time was short, so they got my experience instead.

I tried to explain how cool all of this was, but I'm afraid they are too into Soulja Boy to get it.

Yeah.

A Hard Day’s Night

I have learned an important lesson. I have learned to feel dumb. Now, I am trying to continue feeling that way.

It isn’t easy.

About six months ago, I started writing songs accidentally. A friend got stuck with the words for a verse and asked for help. The acoustic guitar played, and after staring for a second at my notebook, I started writing. My words didn’t go perfectly with the music, but with some tweaking, the song sounded pretty good. Thus began my new hobby.

Five or six songs later, I started getting the itch—the itch to perform. It felt strange hearing my words from the perspective of an audience member. I didn’t desire the spotlight or the ego inflation. I just wanted to experience the performance of something that I helped create.

Unfortunately, I am no musician. I suffered through a few years of piano lessons as a kid, but that’s the extent of my training. So, I picked up the tambourine, shakers and bells and learned little parts for each of the songs.  Sort of.

After only a few practices, I realized that I am a total moron when it comes to music. I am not a natural. I don’t “hear” where my notes should go. I don’t “feel” the rhythm in an accurate way. I can’t watch the guitar and “follow its lead.” Don’t even think about my inventing my own parts.

Most of the time, I get really frustrated with myself and, within five minutes, I’m crying. I have quit the band about twenty times. I snap at my friend who is attempting to teach me. At the bar after a particularly enjoyable session, I was ordered an “Attitude Adjustment.” Let’s just say I am a royal pain in the arse—just trying to play a couple notes or do a little shake, shake, shake.

Yesterday, I realized why my behavior seemed kind of familiar to me. I’ve seen it from my students a million times. I have been driven crazy by that behavior a million times. They’ve wanted to give up, and I’ve wanted to give up on them a million times. I didn’t understand their strong emotional responses – the tears, pissyness and anger – until now.

I am good at many things, so I’ve stayed away from the things that don’t come easily for me. I hate it when I don’t automatically get something. But what a cop-out is that? I’m never going to work through the tough stuff? How can I expect my students to keep struggling if I can’t do the same?

I have a new respect for those who can stick it out and keep trying.  We can’t be brilliant at everything. So, the next time a kid freaks out in my class because he/she doesn’t get an assignment or can’t understand a passage, I’m probably going to feel and react a whole lot differently.

I started out trying to be a rock star, but I’m learning how to be a better teacher. And hopefully a better, more humble person too.

I'm It!

I got tagged by Mentor Texts.... I feel cool. Seriously.

Teaching Meme

1. I am a good teacher because... I was a total failure as a high school student. I remember all too well how it feels on the other side. Also, I live by my mantra, “If I am bored, then they probably are too.”

2. If I weren't a teacher, I would be... a rock star, a journalist, a poet, a writer of creative non-fiction, a collage-maker, a something-with-my-hands, or a manager/muse to creative types. But probably a teacher.

3. My teaching style is... like a stealthy ninja. We’re having fun…we’re having fun…we’re having fun…we’re laughing at the teacher for running into her desk again…we’re having fun…Oops! I learned something! How’d that happen?!

4. My classroom is... far, far away in some magical and slightly misty world. Until that fantasy reaches me, I share for my two classes and then trailer it in a room of very separate two purposes, which I share without too much pleasure.

5. My lesson plans... were really lovely and detailed when I did them in grad school.

6. One of my teaching goals is…to make kids figure out that they are smart and can learn all by themselves.

7. The toughest part of teaching is...having enough energy to get through the day and still having ten hours of marking to do when I get home at night.

8. The thing I love most about teaching is... how alive I feel when I’m doing it. The kids are cool too. : )

9. A common misconception about teaching is...that teachers are really clean-cut folks. I mean, lots of these folks really know how to unwind. It kinda freaks me out.

10. The most important thing I've learned since I started teaching...is not to let school completely take over your life outside of school. One divorce later, I’ve learned that I must remember to pay attention and nurture my personal life.  But I still have to remind myself.

I'll tag:
David Warlick
Alan November
Hedgetoad
Dana Huff
Mary
Mimi
educat

My apologies if anyone's already been tagged.

so let's procrastinate

from ramblin' educat...

(hope)Fully

I am at a planning standstill because I now have too many jobs. Brain does not compute.

I will teach two ninth grade genre courses. I will start and run a writing center. I will run a learning lab for kids who had less-than-stellar grades last term. I will be yearbook editor for the first time. I will write writing guidelines, like a style book, for the humanities departments at my school. I will finish my tech grant. I will prepare a presentation for a regional independent schools conference.

I will move to my fifth classroom in four years. I will unpack my boxes and find my materials.

I will not lose my mind.

Get Back to Reading

I can’t sleep. I start school in a week.

It’s going to be my fourth year teaching. Why do I still feel brand new?

Some things have changed. I still don’t know what I’m doing, only now I don’t care that I don’t know what  I’m doing as much. That is until I start having my annual School Starting Anxiety Dreams—then I wish I had prepared my butt off all summer.

But I did other things. I started writing songs and played shows with a rock band. I attempted to play Transformers with my new four-year-old, who is unnaturally obsessive about anything that ends with “con". I cooked food in my kitchen without using the microwave. I stopped taking the meds that were supposed to stop me from becoming a depressed zombie and found out they’d been making me a depressed zombie.
I walked my ridiculous Chihuahua and did sit-ups on a regular basis.

I did not, however, read Great Expectations.

Summer reading should be sweet, pleasurable, and thought provoking in a ninja-like way. Summer reading should inspire life-long reading habits in kids. Summer reading should not be like a fist to the gut of a going-on-ninth-grader, who is suddenly longing, nay  pining, for the good old days spent with Atticus Finch and Family. Great Expectations is an incredible book, but it is not good summer reading.

I am tickled by the possible redeeming social value of my very privileged students reading about Pip and his pathetic piece of dinner bread stuck up a pants leg while they lounged on the beach with friends in Costa Rica, cruised to Alaska, and cavorted in Sweden. Perhaps they all suddenly appreciated their exceptional place in society. Perhaps some will decide to throw off parental expectations and become social workers, public defenders and readers for the blind instead of succumbing to investment bankerdom. But, perhaps not.

I’d like to wager that many didn’t get through this novel at all. I am comfortable making this wager because I am hovering at around page one hundred, and I am their English teacher.

I’d rather assign books that would get greater numbers of them all the way through their reading, hopefully encouraging them to love reading and to look forward to reading in high school. Couldn’t we wait to scare and intimidate them with our mighty profundity after school starts?

So, here’s to a summer reading list full of books like Harry Potter, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and The  Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time! Here’s to letting kids choose their own summer reading books!

Ok. I am not really an English teacher’s English teacher. But I still kinda have a point.

What was my point? Oh, right...

I should get to sleep, so I can read Dickens tomorrow. There's a long road ahead for me and Pip.

the great debate

I love the resources at the  Folger Shakespeare Library. The site contains background info on Shakespeare, background on each play, and lots of detailed lesson plans and resources for each play. Right now I am teaching "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet," and I used two of the lesson plans, with some modifications, this week with pretty remarkable success.

The Romeo and Juliet lesson explores a primary document from 1604 outlining the rules for marriage. First we talked about why folks back then had each rule. I taught them about reading banns and how marriage licenses today work. Then the kids discussed as a class how Friar Laurence doesn’t obey any of these rules when he marries Romeo and Juliet. After that, I split the class into two groups, one to argue in favor of Friar Laurence performing the marriage and one to argue against it. Each of their points needed to be supported by specific evidence from the text or the marriage law document. They worked for about fifteen-twenty minutes.

The next day we did a debate. I let pro give all their arguments and then the con give theirs. Afterwards, each group had several minutes to confer before presenting their rebuttals. The day of the debate, my principal and my chair walked in to observe me, during my insane, overly-full-of-ninth-grade-boys class! And they actually didn’t make eighty million references to sex! Yea!

I felt so proud of what they did today. Both groups had strong arguments supported by the texts and responded to my clarifying questions like they understood the play backwards and forwards. They were magnificent. The head and the heart both won.

At the end, my principal told me the lesson was "very inventive.” In my head, I was all like, “Uh, not really. Teachers do this kind of thing all the time.” But here’s the thing: he doesn’t KNOW that. My school is lost in some sort of college-circa-1950-teaching black hole, i.e. old, ivy-educated, white-haired men wisely intoning their knowledge while students busily write everything down to repeat back on a big test. Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t anything disastrous about those teachers or their methods. One day those kids will probably have a class with a professor long past the age of retirement, and they will be ready. But I think, I hope, things are changing. I hear some admins and teachers say the right (according to me) things (you know, interdisciplinary learning, authentic learning, student-driven, interest-driven, collaborative, blah blah blah) , but when it comes to implementing real change, I see major foot dragging. I can’t even write about that yet because it’s making me really upset.

I’ve been feeling for awhile (is this supposed to be "a while" like Word tells me??) that the school wants a teacher like me in theory but not in reality. Tomorrow I am thinking about suggesting to my principal that I step out of teaching literature classes altogether next year and shape my position as a combo of writing center, learning lab and techie girl. It is part of the “vision” of the school to use more instructional technology, and I can easily envision  bringing the techie love to other teachers  as part of my job. You know, teaching workshops, suggesting lesson ideas, helping implement them, etc.

I dunno.

Hm, grumps again. More on the Macbeth lesson later…