Posts (page 2)

I won't pretend to have pored over Ruby Payne's "Framework for Understanding Poverty" with the level of detail that a meaningful review would require.  Times are tight, life is stressful, and I am an inherently weak and lazy person.  I will make my best effort and apologize in advane for the little that I am bringing to the table.

My initial response would be to complain that the book overgeneralizes about people in poverty, people in the middle class, and people with wealth, but thats essentially what sociology is: generalization.  Are there certain behaviors that appear significantly more often among poor people than among the middle class and the wealthy?  Yes. Is it still an oversimplification of any individual to use them as a case study to prove or disprove one of those larger trends?  Absolutely.  So, while I recognize some of the points that she makes about how poor children respond to certain things in comparison to more middle class children, I do not think that it would be fruitful to bring it back and apply it to the classroom.  Part of the challenge of teaching is to doggedly insist on seeing your students as unique individuals and not further instances of angry, poor children in a struggling school district.  I'm as soft and high-minded of a liberal as any one here, but as much as might want to or naturally try to apologize for and excuse the behavior of some of my students, its very easy at the end of the day to start to view them all as part of one big problem and respond to them as though they were all the same.  Now I'm sure with more attention to the book's findings I might have something of value to go back to class with to respond to some of those individuals, but I'm not interested in any catch-all "framework" for understanding poverty, when poverty is really, insofar as we are trying to understand it, a diverse group of people who are experiencing it.  

Contrary to what the title of this post might suggest, my first two days were, by and large, successful, free of obvious failures, and, most importantly, a release of the almost unbearable anxiety I was feeling from the thought of getting up in front of a new set of kids.  It is true that that anxiety has been replaced by a new weight upon my soul as I contemplate the vast sums of paperwork, planning, and drudgery that await me on top of somehow continuing to manage my classroom successfully without possessing any natural aptitude for it, but I appreciate the variety. 

As I prepare to reflect upon my first days in school with kids, I will continue to stick to my pledge of avoiding negativity and excessive complaints.  However, since my stress level is so high that some complaining is going to be inevitable, I'm going to set certain ground rules for what I deem acceptable and unacceptable complaints.  If only my classroom had such clear procedures.

1.  No complaining about the education level of the students.  
    To me, it seems absurd, if tempting, to complain about or disparage the children that you have because they do not read, write, speak, or complete math problems correctly.  This is like signing up to help fight forest fires and immediately complaining about the heat, quantity of fire, and the fact that all the trees are burning up.  Except, instead of volunteering, you are being paid 32,000 dollars a year (a respectable sum for most people in this country and especially the world) and receiving a free graduate degree and a laptop (courtesy of the recovering Morgan Freeman) to do a job that, while incredibly stressful and time-consuming, puts you in no life-threatening danger.  At the end of the day, at least in the case of teachers in the program, you probably have the easiest life out of all the people in your classroom, whether we are talking about the long or short term.  I am very willing to argue this with anyone.  No one feels more exhausted than I am, but I will refuse to build myself back up by disparaging my students, even the ones that appear poised to irritate me in the coming months, and I absolutely refuse to dwell on the skills that they lack.  The fact that these deficiencies are primarily not their faults as individuals seems to be the whole point of coming here in the first place.

2.  As little complaining as humanly possible about other teachers and the administration:
    One pleasant surprise about North Panola has been the high quality of administration and teachers at the school.  If I was being honest with myself I would say that I feel like I have a chance to be pretty good teacher (though there are other possible outcomes), but I would not be surprised if, at the end of the year, I was still in the lower percentiles of teachers there.  Like I said, that has nothing to do with me, but is a testament to the extent that having experience, a shared background with your students, and a certain personality type are incredible advantages when it comes to teaching.  This again makes me wonder a little about our program design.  On average, does someone like me, a relatively soft-at-heart, well-meaning, well-educated, white northener (no, this does not describe everyone in the program, but it represents a good portion) have the same ceiling for teaching-quality as someone who came out of the schools that we are teaching in, has been successful in spite of that, has the same background, and has always wanted to be a teacher, suggesting their personality type might be more in line with an ideal teacher than people who decide to give it a shot after graduating?  I would say no.  I still think this program does a very good job by supplying these schools with good teachers.  I just think it could do even more good if it offered its benefits (or at least more of them) and its training to people who deserve it more, are more suited, and are more likely to stay in the field and especially in the area.

 Back to the main point, however, the reason I'm witholding my complaints about the administration is that, while of course there are things that could have gone smoother, disruptions that could have been avoided, and information I would have liked to have had earlier, it seems like an incredibly hard job.  I find managing a single classroom and coming up with a file for each person to be incredibly intimidating, I do not know how I would react to trying to handle an entire school.   Of course, there are plenty of bad principals out there in Mississippi, but I'm willing to give mine the benefit out of the doubt and, if that benefit runs outs, I'll try to channel that energy I would devote to complaining towards the things I need to improve in handling my small, sliver of what goes on in that school.

3.  I will not complain about the cultural difference between me and my students or the problems that result from them.
    My students did not ask me to come to Mississippi.  Reggie Barnes, my favorite part of summer training, made the point that we are the intruders, not the students.  It is true that my students do things, make statements, and possess names that appear unusual to a white person from New York.  That is not their problem.  It is mine.  I will make my best effort to have my world fade into theirs as much as possible.  To the extent that it is not or that I resist, I will not hold our differences against them.  I can handle them being held against me.  They have more things of true importance to worry about in their own lives and possess less rights as human beings than I do.

With these limits in mind, I'll hold off on writing anything until later when I have more time to think and have gotten more preparation and organization done.  To be honest, a lot of my stress and general edginess stems from personal issues rather than professional.  If I was doing this without massive credit card debt and car trouble and while continuing to live with my girlfriend for the next two years instead of dealing with the separation, it would still be hard but I would be significantly more confident in my ability to handle it than I have been lately.  All that said, I am still alive and taking it one day and many, many hours of preparation at a time.  Part of me hopes that I'll be able to come up for air at some point in the next couple months and feel a little more in control, but life has very little to do with hope and a lot more to do with surviving, managing, and finding some kind of happiness in whats in front of you.  It very truly could be a lot worse.

So, my final required post of the summer.  This is a free write, so you might think that would promise a good post, but I'll be honest: I dont' have it in me today.  I'm driving up to Memphis in a couple hours to pick up Sarah, which is exciting, I'm beginning real school in a week, which is frightening, I finished doing my classroom management presentation effectively concluding the program for the summer, which is relieving, but all of these things combine to make me dead inside, trudging towards an approximation of the necessary length of a blog post.  All of these words, one after the other, in succession, combining to form some kind of mean, serve only to extend a post that deserves to die now.

With that behind us, I have elected to write about the attitude I am gong to force myself to maintain as events intensify, loyalties waver, and long-held beliefs are cast aside.  More than anything else, I'm going to eschew martyrdom.  I tire of the negativity that accompanies teaching, even if most of it is justified by the sad state of certain districts.  I said this at the beginning and I still hold to it, now that I'm a real teacher or at least somebody with a teaching license, but this is not a sacrifice, this is a job and, in the grand scheme of things, a very good job.  I will not be paid more than 34,000 dollars a year, but neither are 99 percent of people in the world and most people in the country (or at least most people my age).   I will be disrespected routinely, will likely have to follow procedures that do not seem to make sense, and may be underneath people who do not seem to deserve their position, just like almost everyone at almost every single job in the country.  I will not be undergoing unbearable physical stress.  I am in no way entitled to anything that pays better or has more prestige or power.  I will have plenty of time off.  I will be working a white-collar job, one that would be considered a great success for almost all of the students that I will be teaching. I will be getting a free education and certificate.  I will have the support of an organization and a group of peers.  I will be receiving loan reimbursement.  I will continue to type away on this free laptop.  So, please, if you hear me complaining about how my life is hard, tell me to shut up.  Likewise, if you notice me becoming self-congratulatory on my selflessness, chastise me as well for that.  I don't' know what the hell I'd be doing if I wasn't here.  I was told today that a lot of us might be giving up six-figure incomes to come here.  I am not in that category.  I am much closer to giving up 6 dollars an hour to come here.  All that said, I acknowledge that it is going to be difficult and I empathize with some of the struggles that people have had, but I would rather be having a headache every day teaching than go back to some of the jobs I was working at before I came here.  I am going to do everything I can to dedicate that energy that I might spend complaining to being optimistic, efficient, and achieving some degree of success and happiness.  That is all for now because the social is in a matter of minutes, but I will write more later, possibily with a more liberal use of paragraphs.

The first part of my evaluation will be evaluating the evaluation procedure.  We had 5 separate formal evaluations to fill out this morning and now we also have to write a blog offering our evaluation, which, in addition to being redundant, seems to undermine the anonymity of our previous evaluations.  Points have been docked.  I guess I'll just try to hit a few things that might be of interest to outsiders.

Summer School:  The summer school is pretty much as good a training experience a program of our size can set up.  While it would be nice to have larger classes and a more realistic classroom environment, I had enough practice and headaches to get some sense of what the year will be like.  I have some objection to the activity club, though from the perspective of a teacher I really enjoyed it.  It just seems that summer school is hard enough on kids, they shouldn't have to stay an extra 45 minutes for "fun" activities when they probably have more fun things they could be doing without us.  The added interaction with kids and practice in those kinds of club environments is good, but it seems a little cruel to do it everyday.  Altogether though, the summer school is probably the best part of the summer training

Evaluations/Role Plays:  The evaluations were generally helpful, but I wish that helpfulness carried over into the role play evaluation process, insofar as one existed.  The team teachers all put in effort and had good plans, but there really wasn't enough structure to make them into legitimate learning experiences.  For example, if we're acting out a scenario where a kid gets in a verbal confrontation with a student, there should be specific guidelines or a handful of different guidelines for different teaching styles, concrete approval or disapproval of what the pretend teacher did, and a limit on the behavior of the people playing students so that role play doesn't become about something else entirely.  Altogether, as much as I didn't enjoy them personally, I'll admit that role plays have the potential to be beneficial, but I'm not sure that they were this time around.  I would say this needs the most improvement.

I expended most of my pithy comments and obnoxious references on my classroom management today, so, with my arsenal sapped, I will move onto the last required post of the summer.

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.

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