Karl's Blog

Summer is winding down, real teaching is only 3 weeks away, and I've just watched my second teaching video.  Now would be an appropriate time to reflect on my progress as a teacher, and even if it weren't I would have to for an assignment. I have taught two math classes.  I have slept for mere minutes after lesson-planning for hours on end.  I have been struck by falling projection screens.  I have been charged by angry cattle, left with little hope of survival.  I have been disrespected and demoralized routinely by a group of 7 8th graders.  I have seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All these moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to reflect.

Differences between this teaching video and the last:

I seem more confident
I seem less nervous
I am more comfortable doing a lesson that's fun
My classroom management seems weak, but I think thats just this particular day
I walk around, but not more than necessary
My voice is a little more controlled, but it seems unnecessarily loud at time, but thats probably better than the opposite
Its not quite as intolerable to watch myself on video, maybe I'm just getting used to it, or maybe i'm less insufferable as a teacher/person, more likely i paid less close attention to the video
I'm more comfortable with quiet in the classroom than I was before

All in all, the lesson I ended up taping was unusual because it was a project work day and, since I haven't done much of that kind of thing before, I'll forgive myself for being soft and flustered when it comes to classroom management.  Once this summer school is over and more time has passed, maybe I'll get a better sense of how I've done and what I've learned.  Right now, I'll move on to entertain myself a little more with slovenliness before finishing up the few lessons I have left.

The following will be in list form, the hobgoblin of small minds and lazy writers:

1.  Neatness and Organization Are Important
    I've had the advantage of having two team teachers, so you might expect my first lesson to be more profound and something I didn't already know about myself, but Meredith pointed out Friday how disorganized I am when I present things on the transparency and the board.  That would be fine for people like me who live in a world where numbers are chaotically strewn across their psychic landscape, but I think the kids would like to know what it is I'm writing.   Solution:  More typed notes and transparencies, Less writing in general

2.  Self-Deprecation and Humor Have Their Limits
    One of the ways, I deal with the nervousness, though its largely subsided, of being in front of a class is to be             self-deprecating, about my handwriting, my ability to accomplish anything besides math, etc.  I think it's somewhat     effective in either marginally entertaining the kids or at least keeping them from deriding me in the same way.              However, Mason made the point that if I'm always joking and especially if I'm always sort of putting myself down,     then the students will eventually think its ok.  So, I've tried to be serious for longer periods of time and follow any      self-deprecating remark with some other remark that implies their certain failure if they try the same thing.  I'm          really not too worried about finding a balance eventually, but I do think its important that I establish a serious side first and foremost before ultimately betraying and undermining it.

3.   Don't' Give Away Right and Wrong Answers By Your Response
This is pretty nuts and bolts, but I got the importance when Meredith pointed out how I always react the same way to answers that are right and another way to answers that are wrong.  Doing that means that you don't ask the kids who got it right to explain how they got it and you don't have the kids who got it wrong figure out for themselves that they got it wrong.   This seems fairly correctable, which is why I appreciate the input of the Team Teachers because they avoided general platitudes like "be good at managing your classroom" and focused on things that are concrete and correctable. 

I suppose it could be considered discouraging that all three things that I listed were things I needed to improve upon.  I could have learned about some of the things that I really do well and how I've grown in self-assurance.  That might be true, but my ego is vast, hidden behind curtains of self-deprecation, and doesn't need to be explored or extended in this space.
 

The following will be in list form, the hobgoblin of small minds and lazy writers:

1.  Neatness and Organization Are Important
    I've had the advantage of having two team teachers, so you might expect my first lesson to be more profound and something I didn't already know about myself, but Meredith pointed out Friday how disorganized I am when I present things on the transparency and the board.  That would be fine for people like me who live in a world where numbers are chaotically strewn across their psychic landscape, but I think the kids would like to know what it is I'm writing.   Solution:  More typed notes and transparencies, Less writing in general

2.  Self-Deprecation and Humor Have Their Limits
    One of the ways, I deal with the nervousness, though its largely subsided, of being in front of a class is to be             self-deprecating, about my handwriting, my ability to accomplish anything besides math, etc.  I think it's somewhat     effective in either marginally entertaining the kids or at least keeping them from deriding me in the same way.              However, Mason made the point that if I'm always joking and especially if I'm always sort of putting myself down,     then the students will eventually think its ok.  So, I've tried to be serious for longer periods of time and follow any      self-deprecating remark with some other remark that implies their certain failure if they try the same thing.  I'm          really not too worried about finding a balance eventually, but I do think its important that I establish a serious side first and foremost before ultimately betraying and undermining it.

3.   Don't' Give Away Right and Wrong Answers By Your Response
This is pretty nuts and bolts, but I got the importance when Meredith pointed out how I always react the same way to answers that are right and another way to answers that are wrong.  Doing that means that you don't ask the kids who got it right to explain how they got it and you don't have the kids who got it wrong figure out for themselves that they got it wrong.   This seems fairly correctable, which is why I appreciate the input of the Team Teachers because they avoided general platitudes like "be good at managing your classroom" and focused on things that are concrete and correctable. 

I suppose it could be considered discouraging that all three things that I listed were things I needed to improve upon.  I could have learned about some of the things that I really do well and how I've grown in self-assurance.  That might be true, but my ego is vast, hidden behind curtains of self-deprecation, and doesn't need to be explored or extended in this space.
 

I honestly don't like rushing through these, because I genuinely need an outlet for all the poorly written sentences that pop into my head, but between the other blog assignments and the many lesson plans due this week, I'm going to have to be concise.

If I was talking about being a good Holly Springs summer school teacher, I would think that I most need to improve the organization and presentation of my lessons.  But, since I'm shifting focus towards the school year, I think the obvious answer would be developing a persona that is both who I want to be as a teacher and firm enough to maintain order.  Of course, thats how I would have answered this question at the beginning of the summer and even before the summer, but that doesn't make it any less important.  I'm not interested in doing this if I have to sacrifice every motivation I had for joining in order to be successful, but of course I also wouldn't be interested in doing it if I couldn't be successful. 

The only difference between the beginning of the summer and now is that now I have a good deal of confidence that I'll be able to improve enough that I can both be myself and be effective.   I don't say that because I can handle a summer school class, both because my classroom management there is hardly flawless and because it bears little resemblance to a real classroom.  I say it because I've come to feel that whatever goes on, I can live with it, react, and make the best of it.   There are few things I give myself credit for, but I'd like to think that I have a great deal of patience and an ability to adapt my goals to what the situation will allow.  I wouldn't say that means I have low expectations, partly because that would lead to me being assaulted and fired by someone from the board of education, but I'd say that I can live with failure, whether its my own or the students.   Of course, as a teacher, the job is to do everything I can to avoid the failure of my students and the failure of myself.  All I'm saying is that failure is a constant, so I won't let it depress me, even if it means living through days where your failure to represent the authority figure you need to be leads your rules and procedures to mean nothing and your classroom becomes unproductive.  Hopefully, releasing myself from that pressure to never fail will make those days fewer and farther between.

Some humanoid-like creature is mumbling nervously in some incomprehensible language and an unbearable tone is pacing frantically as though it were on some form of narcotic.  I am told that this creature is me, that it is teaching, and that I need to evaluate and reflect upon its (in)ability to do so.  Let us begin.

First, while it is completely unbearable to watch myself on camera doing something that I still need significantly more practice at, I'll start by saying that it could've been worse.  As often as I tend to put myself down, I will say that there are some things I think I do well as a teacher.  I ask lots of questions, usually let the students get the answer, give them a good amount of practice, and remain positive (if irritating to observers such as myself) when helping those that are stuck.  If I don't learn to be more firm, which isn't really an issue on the video, some of those things might be undermined, but I can at least say that the video confirmed at least a few things that I feel like are going well.

As for things that need improvement:
1.  I talk too much and too fast
2.  I walk too much and too fast
3.  My lessons are plain
4.  My sets are either not very related to the student's lives or not very related to the lesson

There's more than that that needs work, but I can only endure so much self-criticism at a time.  Below are proposed solutions, which I should work on now because once the year starts I'll have a whole new set of problems:

1.  Well, I'll talk less.  I have two lesson plans to write today and I think I'll take the Reluctant Disciplinarian's advice of trying to speak 100 words or less in at least one of them.   I need to overcome my desire to insert myself into the goings-on of the classroom.  Perhaps I'm just lonely and long for human conversation from the corner of the room.  Perhaps I think the students aren't getting it and that rambling more won't actually help.  Perhaps I have some hidden resentment for my students and want to punish them with the sound of my voice.  All are possibilities, but most likely I'm just nervous and feel uncomfortable when I'm not continually offering directions.  If I'm talking and if they're paying attention, they can't be passing judgment on my ability as a teacher.  In any case, we'll see how it goes on Monday.  I'm going to shoot for 50 words or less, in fact.  All the children's dreams are coming true.

2.  I will also walk less and slower.  I feel like this also mostly nervous and its not that much of a negative.  It's good to be moving around the room, I just feel like it becomes a distraction when I do 200 revolutions of the room per lesson.

3.  Dealing with the boredom of my lessons is a little tougher, because I'm an inherently boring person (as many people could testify to), but I'm going to make a larger effort to do activities and (taking the idea of multiple intelligences) provide more of a mix of different ways to learn the same thing, instead of my current "here's a worksheet, here's an example on the board, here's some examples in your book" procedure.

4.  Finally, I'll do better sets and closures, but I dont' really know how.  I have mixed feelings about sets.  I feel like when you have a good one, they're worth doing.  When you don't, you sound like me, asking them stupid questions about pizza only to disappoint them further by changing the topic to fractions.  I haven't had much like finding inspiration from on-line lessons, but I will have the advantage of teaching the same subject at the same school as Lisa, one of the second-years, so perhaps she can be bought or, more likely, I can use the communal planning period to develop/steal ideas from someone who has at least had practice trying to manipulate kids into thinking that they want to learn math. 

More criticism of myself could be offered and certainly will be in the monologues going in my mind as I try to stand silently in class while kids work on Monday, but I have exposed my flaws as a teacher enough for today.  I do not like to have been seen.  Another reflection on a another video that will have to be taken of me teaching is required in a couple of weeks, so incalculable fun for all is forthcoming.  I will try to write again as soon as possible to start pushing all memories of this video and post out of the collective consciousness.

I was thinking about filling our requirement to do a blog incorporating photos with a series of pictures of household objects (to save me from real photo-journalism) presented without explanation, but even that proved to be too much work with my schedule now having picked up and my sleep non-existent.  I will instead provide a picture with the view from where I've been spending most of my time lesson-planning, at the highest point of the student union I could find, far above the unburdened merriment of Ole Miss undergrads, like a MTC version of Quasimodo, toiling in solitude hidden from view of the masses.  And that is the life I shall return now, feeling justified in this throw-away blog by my extensive, work-delaying post from days before.

100_0215

In place of doing the work for tomorrow that I should be doing for tomorrow, I thought I'd provide my contradicting thoughts on a topic that I've talked to people about and read others write about recently:  whether or not the Mississippi Teacher Corps/Teach for America model actually does good for the schools its trying to help. 

The most powerful criticism I hear levied against these programs is that they are ultimately perpetuating the cycle of inexperienced teachers going in and out of the schools with the most problems.  Given that most teachers in these programs are not very good in their first year, somewhat improved but still inexperienced in the second year, and usually, though not always, off to schools with less problems in other states in their third year, when do the schools actually benefit?

The response I usually hear might take one of three forms.  First, not all MTC or TFA teachers are below average in their first year and not all of them leave, so some of these schools are getting quality teachers that they might not have been able to persuade to teach in their schools otherwise.  Second, even the weak teachers with good intentions who struggle in their first-year can be superior alternatives to the long-term subs or completely unqualified people that get hired in districts where they're suffering the kind of teacher shortages that exist here.  Third, and this probably applies more to TFA who encourages teachers to do something else after the program is finished but also to MTC people who decide teaching isn't for them, the people who come out of the program, however ineffective a teacher they might have been, possess an understanding of the problems in education, a sympathy for teachers, and a desire to make changes in ways that don't require classroom management skills.

My reaction to all of this usually ends with the sense that MTC and TFA generally do more good than harm, though I'm highly skeptical about them as models for education reform.  Although I do find it troubling that high turnover becomes a fixture in these schools by depending on a two-year program for a portion of their faculty, there are probably enough really good, highly motivated teachers that make an impact in their time here to compensate for the lack of stability that probably would exist anyway given how hard it is to retain quality teachers in schools with so many problems.  I also think that bringing in well-intentioned, energetic (at least at first) people can make a difference, as long as that person is capable of figuring how to maintain enough order to display those traits.  I had been feeling like that less after coming here, but I had a conversation with a landlord who talked about how he was asked to volunteer as a drivers ed teacher at the high school where I'll be teaching.  For the last 10 years, the drivers ed teacher had only managed to get 3 students per year in his class get their permits, but this person who had never done it before, because he was motivated and tried hard to figure out something new, had 19 people from his class get their permit.  That reminded me why this program made sense to me in the beginning.  While it is absolutely true that the qualities people here are supposed to have can be nullified by an inability to adapt to their lack of experience, they can also help someone make an actual impact when they manage to get everything else right.

Still, while I think bringing in first-year teachers to schools, even for a short period of time, can be a good thing, there are other things that make me skeptical about the potential effect of these programs (besides the fact that they accept people like me who pontificate instead of plan their lessons).  My main objection, and I'm reminded of this by a comment made by Chimaobi on another blog that the program should recruit exclusively from the pool of people we're trying to teach , is that there is no reason to expect that the people with the most potential to be successful teachers, in Mississippi for example, would come from the highest-performing students in the best schools.  If an ability to understand, relate to, and manage a classroom of students in poverty and a sense of altruism are the best indicators of a high-impact teacher in these schools, why recruit from that demographic?  To me, being a high-achiever from a prestigous school suggests only two things.  First, most of them are probably coming from a middle-class background and, second, they have done an exceptionally good job of advancing their own interests in school and elsewhere.  Neither of those suggest that they will be likely to come down here, successfully teach and supervise children in poverty, and have the best interests of the people they are serving at heart as opposed to planning on using it as a springboard to something else (especially in the case of TFA, though I've openly questioned the purity of my own intentions in this regard).  That isn't to say that being a good college student precludes those things either, its just that I feel like we would have better luck if we brought in smart people from the area and of similar backgrounds to do the job because, at the very least, they will adapt more easily to the environment having grown up in it.  On top of that, these programs send a disturbing message to lower-income communities and that is that they cannot be trusted to handle their own problems with their own talented people but need bus-loads of largely white, over-privileged, just-out-of-college outsiders to "save" their schools.  To be fair, there are people of different backgrounds in the program and there is room for the well-intentioned college graduates to do good, I just feel that people like me should be the exception rather than the rule down here if we're talking about these programs as a long-term way of dealing with the lack of good teachers.   I appreciate all of the benefits I'm getting, but I feel like a free teaching certificate and master's degree should be going to those that are sure they want to teach as a career, not just for two years, and will use that certificate in the place that we need them to serve, not take it back home where there aren't the kind of shortages that there are here.  I am going to do my best to put the program's investment in me to good use, and I'm somewhat confident I might be able to do a good job, but, if I were the program, there are people that I would feel much safer betting on than myself.  

Although I never like being required to write about a certain topic, especially one that only means something to people in the program, the "Reluctant Disciplinarian" was a big step up from the last book we had to read by a Wong and Wong.  Neither book aspires to an academic discussion of education, but both provide laundry lists of practical advice on how to manage a classroom. The Reluctant Disciplinarian at least attaches a sense of humor and an openness to the author's own fallibility, which makes it a lot more palatable.  What I found most preferable about Rubinstein's book is that, through his advice and through the section where other teachers offer their input, he projects a sense that there is more than one way to be a teacher.  One problem I had with Wong and Wong and, to a lesser extent, with the program's teaching in general, is that the same image of a classroom comes up over and over.  Creativity is encouraged in creating lessons, though I'm not that creative when it comes to math lessons, but I feel like creativity in who you are as a teacher is emphasized far less, as I keep coming up against the same image of how a classroom is run.  Incremental consequences with names written on the board.  A classroom where the students are supposed to be doing all the work.  Lessons always taught in set-content-assessment-closure form.  Rules that are behavior-specific.  That's not to say I won't do any of those things.   In fact, I'll probably end up doing most of what Wong and Wong tell us to do.  And it's not to say that the program doesn't recognize different models of teaching.  It's just that I appreciated Rubinstein's talk about fine-tuning who you are as a teacher based on who you are as a person, while still reiterating the importance of firmness, consistency, professionalism, and all those traits I wonder if I can replicate under pressure.

It was especially good timing for us to have read this book now, because it is just now that I'm starting to wonder how I can shift my focus from figuring out how to teach lessons to figure out how to have control of the classroom.  I feel like any order that exists in my classroom comes from nothing that I'm doing, at least not consciously, and is 99% due to the ridiculously small student-teacher ratio, the fact that our kids are only now starting to know one another, and because its summer school so there's less need to perform and more desire to just pass.  Before reading the book, Matt Alred said something when talking about classroom management that did make me think about assumptions I might have been making about what it means to be a caring teacher.  It was something to the effect that caring shouldn't be confused with being friendly and that the best thing you can do for kids here is not to be their friend, they have enough of those, but to be their teacher and to always be their teacher.  Coming in, I would have been turned off by the idea of never loosening up and thought that I could be a teacher during the day, but be more of a mentor outside of class and talk to kids as other people instead of as students.  But, when the author was talking about how he always maintained his teacher persona, even outside school, and the students really believed that the teacher was the person he was in class, I realized that meaningful relationships are possible without having to break out of the role that you are there to carry out.   I still don't believe that my only purpose here is to increase the number of people in the world that can solve multi-step equations, but I'm starting to think that a level of seriousness about that purpose and firmness in carrying out doesn't undermine the other, more sentimental reasons for being here. 

Beyond that, there are a number of practical suggestions I might try to incorporate, but, like everything else, I may have to return to them later on when the reality of having my own classroom becomes more concrete.  Now that I'll be doing some teaching in a new class and be more self-reliant in my own, I might have a chance to start slipping into that mode before offering myself to be feasted upon my students in August.

So usually I put a good deal of effort into these and I will again at some point, but right now I'm going to do need to do a quick job of summarizing what I have learned from the second-year teachers.  I'm not going to beat myself up out it, as I've already produced an excess of self-reflection and pontificating about the minute details of my fragile psyche.

1.  I Need to Talk Less
This is sort of a lesson thats come at me from all angles, as everyone and everything stresses a classroom where the student does the work, but the teachers in my class have pointed out instances where I should really just stop talking, let the kids figure out what I'm asking or what they're supposed to do, and let them do it.  Now, I've been asked to stop talking countless times in my personal life, so I feel like this is something I've spent my life preparing for. The only part of it that makes it a struggle is the feeling that you aren't doing enough to help them when they're not getting the material.  I'm countering that by remembering what my voice sounds like on the video recording I did, which has also inspired to consider having an operation to replace my voice with one of those scary sounding computer-generated voices.

2.  I Need to Go Slow
Now I knew this coming in and I haven't done a terrible job, but the second-years have done a really good job of pointing out things that you would think the kids would get right away but are going to take them several classes.  When planning out my yearly schedule, I'll make sure to always err on the side of going too slowly instead of trying to get every single thing across, because, like I remember Ben saying the other day, if you're not teaching them the first thing, you'll never end up teaching them anything as you hurry from one lesson to the next, leaving a shaky foundation for everything you do afterwards.

3.  I Need to Practice Being Tough
I feel like I started out summer school ready to do classroom management, even though I knew there weren't be much of it during the summer, but our kids have been so docile for most of the year that I eventually fell out of that mindset.  Now I'm finding myself responding meekly to kids talking in class while I'm talking or not doing their work and I need to re-gain that mindset.  I really can't be intimidated by the couple kids who cause any trouble in our class because its really so minor and such a controlled situation that I need to master it before I can teach larger groups.  A couple of the second-years pointed out things that I either hadn't noticed or chose to ignore the last couple days and I am working myself into the resolve necessary to start handing out consequences and developing a more firm persona, which is going to be a huge part of whatever level of success I achieve there.

There are obviously countless other things that I've learned from them, but one of the main things I've observed in the teaching is the need to be prepared in order to teach a good lesson.  I will pay tribute to that lesson by terminating this blog having just achieved the requirements of the assignment in order to put together a decent review for tomorrow on a subject that the students seem to be having a hard time with. 

So, I can't promise that this is going to be interesting, but I'll try to at least explore what levels of fascination exist below the surface of the questioning technique of "cold-calling".  I had been doing cold-calling in the form of calling on people without waiting for them to raise their hand, but in order to satisfy the random element of the definition, I created a deck of index cards with everyone's name on it and pulled from it for a class. 

I tried to draw them in to the idea by asking them to come up with a creative name for my deck of cards, but they didn't seem to be interested in outside-the-box thinking as their first couple responses were "Mr. Mill's deck of cards" and "Mr. Mill's deck of names".  I was hoping for something like "Mr. Mill's Deck of Fear" or something intimidating like that, but the best I got was "Mr. Mill's super-names".  The discussion was eventually tabled and they agreed to keep thinking about it.  To be fair though, if I was a student, I would probably have expressed my displeasure with that kind of question by giving ironic, incredibly over-descriptive responses too.

In terms of the actual workings of the procedure, I don't really have any strong opinion on it.  On the one hand, they may have been slightly more cognizant of the fact that anyone could be called on at any moment, at least if I had done it over a series of days.  On the other hand, I think I had done a pretty good job of establishing that from the beginning.  In fact, the randomness of it often worked against me because there were times I wanted to draw certain students back into the class, but the name of the student whose always paying attention came up.  So I guess, the drawback is that it undermines strategic questioning, but it has the benefit of me getting to students that, for one reason or another, I might unconsciously ignore more often than others.

As Wong and Wong might say, an efficient teacher uses cold-calling just enough that all students are learning, while  an inefficient teacher worries about the questioning technique they are using to "cover" the material, instead of "uncovering" student learning.  I would proceed to a metaphor about the teacher being the coach of a football team, but I will digress.  I do wish that I had tried one of the other techniques, though everything seems trickier to work in with math.  Or maybe I'm just lazy and my lessons are overly straightforward.  In any case, I'll probably use cold-calling again to try to mix things up, but I feel like I need to be more innovative in my questioning techniques to pull the students in.  Anyway, I'm not sure what else to say.  The video-taping of my own lesson is coming up and that will be sure to depress me.  Seeing myself on camera doing anything is bad enough, but exposing my intense awkwardness as I try to succeed in the one thing that I am supposed to be doing here but might be too much.  Since that's probably the next post I will write, prepare for a journey into dark caverns of self-loathing, increasing doubt, and crippling fear.  In spite of how assured I am, that hardly anyone reads this, those tapes will never see the light of day here or anywhere else.