Hello, new kids.

Dear students,

I have decided, henceforth, in honor of Heather Armstrong (dooce.com), to write to my students in the way she does her daughter, once a month. That means the "birthday" will be on the 20th of each month, and I will write my way through the school year with you. Technically, this should be month 13, since it's the start of my second school year. However, since I didn't write to last year's kids, I'm going to call you month 1.

Dear kids of year 2, month 1:

Please don't eat me. I probably won't tell you this in person, but the nightmares about you ignoring me when I ask you things in class, or arguing loudly with me, or generally being rude and disruptive, have been pretty intense. I have been working for over three weeks on making the classroom and the lesson plans interesting and thought provoking. I hope they provoke thought in you.

I am going to be more confident with you this year, so you don't doubt as much that I know what I'm doing. I often doubt that I know what I'm doing, but there's no need for you to feel that way, too.

There are exactly (so far) 51 of you in my three classes. I feel pleased about this, as it means I won't be nearly as overwhelmed as I feared. I expected nearly double that number. I'm sure my kids from the school we were consolidated from will be relieved, too. I know they were worried.

Please don't kill each other, oh three consolidated schools. You are one, now.

I'm teaching Creative Writing, the only one in the whole school this year. Please, kids, be a little creative this year. I'm working hard to come up with a better way to teach, and I really think I've got a great idea this year. Please try.

Last of all, hello, little baby of school year. Hello.

Love,
Mab your teacher

You are asking me WHAT?

So, it's two days before school starts (or was when the event happened) and another teacher walked up to me and said, "I'm doing a bulletin board with the 'who, what, where, why's" of the classes. So, 11th grade is for reading American Lit, and 12th is for reading British, but what do we say about 10th?"

I was so flabbergasted, I couldn't give her a straight answer. She didn't know the purpose of her job, her chosen profession. We turned to another teacher, a veteran of many years, and asked her. She couldn't answer either. We stood mumbling like the kids who don't know the answer and are waiting for someone to answer it for them.

"Well, you don't think it's for solidifying skills, particularly those of writing and reading? Getting those kids ready for the big wide world where people won't be asking them questions about everything they read, but will be expecting them to respond in an intelligent manner anyway?" This was my brilliant response. Or it would have been had I been given a day or so and been beaten within an inch of my life with the brilliant stick.

How can students, who often hate school by the time they reach us, be expected to be motivated by the joy and relevancy of English class, when, in fact, the teachers themselves have no idea? I have some very different ideas about how I'm going to teach this semester - both to make it relevant and to make it actually useful, because I never believed "read this story and answer the questions" ever made much impact in the first place.

However - I'm scared silly that it's not going to work. Welcome to year 2.

Possibilities

Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I'm not more excited by possibilities than I ever am about reality. I have tons of new ideas for this year, not the least of which is dialogue journals, which, if they work as they do in my imagination, will be my savior for classroom management this year.

Here's the idea: Students will write a journal. Then, instead of grading them, I just respond to them. Write them back, if you will. This way, I'm getting to really know my students, and they have the opportunity to vent, or express concern, frustration, etc, without vocalizing everything. When one comes in freaking out about something, I can simply ask him/her to write it out, and maybe that will give the kid a way to vent without flipping out. Or, maybe it will cause the Loch Ness monster to pop out of their stomachs and eat me. We can only see.

I know it's been a long long time. Spring term was easier. And yet, I feel like I did less as a result, and really didn't put in the effort my classes deserved. It was often speculated that I was pregnant, because I was so tired. I think, rather, I just hit spring (and 1st year) survival mode. I am now a second year.

YAY!

I did it again!

Once, a couple of years ago, I had a friend start asking me abourt a book. "I read this book in the sixth grade, and it's about this girl, who lived by the ocean, and I can't remember what it's called...she had a sister"

To which I promptly asked, "Jacob Have I Loved?" and was delighted to find that, yes, I had brilliantly picked the correct book with very little detail. I was particularly proud because this person was a brilliant doctoral candidate in chemistry, and often made me feel a bit self-conscious at my own rather limited knowledge.

On Friday, in my class, I had a student ask me a simliar question: "What's that story about that guy, who took trips, and found a place where all the people were little?" to which I promptly answered "Gulliver's Travels". He and another student were delighted, as they had apparently been debating this question for some time. As hard as it is to impress 11th graders, I was pretty pleased with myself.

It was so nice to have a pleasing moment, too, because it's been a really bad week. It's Sunday, and, as is often the case this year, I'm not looking forward to going back.

Those first few days

I was truly looking forward to leaving last semester behind.

Now, facing a new group, some of which looks excellent, and some of which scares me beyond anything that has frightened before, I feel - lost.

We have had two days of school. Each day I come home feeling ok, not wonderful, but ok. As the evening wanes, and the new day begins, I don't feel comfortable returning. I'm not sure if it's lurking insecurity - maybe these classes are going to implode on me - or if it's just fear that I'm not going to be able to keep up the frenetic pace I'm trying to hold on to in order to keep my classes from getting control of me - but it's making each day look like an insurmountable hurdle.

My first two classes are actually almost fun. They're small, but not too small, and the students actually seem somewhat interested, and since I've experienced teaching those classes before, the preps aren't at all overwhelming.

The last class of the day, however - it's a large class. The size isn't what bothers me; I'm not actually sure what bothers me about that class. The uncertainty. I don't know this group; they're older than the other students I've had and they just seem more likely to see through me.

Everyday is a frantic rush arond to make absolutely certain that I have enough to keep them busy every single moment, so they won't have a minute to challenge me. The worst part is, I don't know if I'll ever get to know them at this pace, and I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to keep it up when I've never prepped for this class before.

I'm just scared silly, and I think that's the worst part of all. I'm not supposed to be scared by them. I'm the one that's supposed to be in charge.

The first semester ended

and now I'm several weeks behind in my "reflections".

Honestly, now that I'm home, I don't want to think about school at all. I've forced it from my mind numerous times, knowing that I need to plan for American Lit, which I've never taught before.

I had a student routinely skipping my class, and I wrote him up every time for it, and he was still there. I don't know what to do with him.

I have not been curving my grades, or doing anything that I feel is cheating, but all my kids, including the above-mentioned, are passing. I'm not sure if that's great, or if I'm not really challenging them enough.

I'm glad I didn't spend more time with the state exam my kids have to take - or the books, anyway, because the kids were all complaining how they'd used those books with their teacher the year before. That's something I hate - the school where I work, teachers arbitrarily give their students almost any material they please, and therefore I'm severely limited the following year, because so often many of them have already read or been through materials that I plan to use, and I'm unaware of it. It's frustrating.

I'm surprised to discover that, even though I thought I was not spending nearly enough time with the materials we covered, and that I was rushing, I still did not cover all the materials I planned to cover.

I did learn some things - I was not nearly mean enough when the semester started, and those kids ran all over me. I hope I've learned enough to do better next semester. I'm frequently nervous that I'm realizing what I'm doing is not working, but that I'm also not improving somehow. I've seen some improvements - starting with my make-up work policy - but in terms of managment of the classroom, I don't know if I'm getting better or not.

I'm delighted to say I've finally liberated myself of most of the stuff left to me from the previous teacher. She had tons of things that I couldn't begin to deal with - for tests that aren't given anymore and for grades that I do not teach. I was afaid to get rid of them for fear she'd come back - there was talk that she'd return, and if she did and I had thrown away her stuff, (she was known for being quite...angry) how surely would she flip out and throw things at me? But I'm going to be be brave! My room is too small to accommodate that much extra stuff. So now, just now, it's starting to look somewhat like an organized classroom.

It's harder to write about the good weeks. What do I say? I still had to fight to get kids to sit down, but somehow it was easier. I got sick on Thursday and stayed home, and went in on Friday. Something happened on Friday and the pep rally got cancelled at the last minute - and no one would tell me why. I assume it was for a good reason, but it was annoying, because it messed up my lesson plans.

However, I had my students write a short skit, using the story that we've been reading, and the class that gives me the most difficulty really responded. They got excited, and wanted to bring props, and demanded to work on it more when they finished their vocabulary test on Friday. It was great to see. Only one of my groups really didn't do much, and I observed that, so their grades will reflect it. I'm a little nervous about Monday - some of them are ahead of the others, so I'll give them time to rehearse it while the others are finishing making cue cards. I'm planning quite a few activities that involve these kinds of movement and involvement - it's slowing down the work a great deal, but I think it's worth it, because the students are responding so much better.

My honors group, however, didn't respond nearly as well. They just didn't seem interested. A couple of students said this was boring. I can't decide if I didn't make the activity challenging enough for them (I let them take artistic license with the story, to make it their own, and gave different parts of the class a different part of the story to work with) or if the smallness of the class dampens the mood, or both. I know the fact that there are a very small number of students in that class dampens the mood in there, and causes some pretty extreme apathy. It's sad, though - because I have some very bright minds that I can't seem to get to create something beyond what they are accustomed to doing - the bare minimum.

Which, oddly, is why I found this post so poignant today: Teachable-Moments

The school picture

My picture for the yearbook came today. NOW I remember why I hated high school. Or at least the pictures. It's absolutely shocking how much this picture looks like the ones I took in high school - and even though I'm considerably past high school age, that's not as flattering as it sounds.

My hair is stringy, my makeup may as well not be on my face, and my shirt appears to be awry. They use freaking digital photography now; you'd think they'd ATTEMPT to not make people look like cretins?

I'm really grateful I got married four months ago and have those pictures to fall back on, otherwise I could truly take this to heart.