Blog Post, Session 10

How can curriculum mapping assist you?  Do you have one?  Does your school/district curriculum map?  Where would/will you start in creating a useful curriculum map for your classroom? 

 I would love to do curriculum mapping, but we don't have that as part of our school. As I said on the webinar last week, as a student I got a lot out of my History/Literature curriculum map as a Junior. It truly makes sense for a Junior English class to blend with a U.S. History course as the crux of Junior English is based on American Literature. (I guess since Arizona dropped AIMS, it's no longer required but I still do it.) When I taught at AAEC, I tried to get the U.S. History teacher to curriculum-map with me and it didn't go well --he wasn't remotely interested in working with me, probably because he didn't want to have to adjust his curriculum to work in a team. It was kind of a bad experience so I've been a little gun-shy about asking at a new school, but it's something to look forward to.

Another subject I've been thinking about working with is the science department: they have been requiring essays recently and my students have been asking me to proofread for them. I don't mind doing this, of course, but many of the questions center around MLA8, so I've been thinking about setting up a Moodle page just to have MLA resources available to all teachers who may use that citation method. This would help all Humanities courses, of course, but if the science teachers accept MLA rather than APA (as I understand they do at our school), this would help cut back on many of the questions they field so they can focus more on answering questions with regard to critical thinking. That's the plan --now to have the time to work on it ;)

9x9x25: Reflection

I'm busy.

This is usually a line used to decline an invitation. To be honest, it was a line I was tempted to use when I started the 9x9x25 challenge.

"I'm busy" is not a subjective term in my case:
-I'm a full-time high school English teacher at Tri-City Prep, which means I regularly clock 50 hours a week between the clubs I advise (Denobis/Creative Writing, Pep Club, Mock Trial), grading essays, and any extracurricular activities (field trips, science symposia, music concerts, etc.).
-I'm a creative writing adjunct at YC.
-I'm the co-municipal liaison for Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month), which hosts workshops in November.
-I'm in a writing group that meets at Method Coffee.
-I co-lead a small group at Heights Church.
-I've been auditing Master Chorale to sing in The Messiah for the Christmas concert.
-I'm a full-time student with Rio Salado finishing my teaching certificate for K-12.
-I'm a part-time student with YC working on an Associates in Administration of Justice (classes I started to lend believability and authenticity to my detective novel).
-Somewhere in there I'm working on several novels and short stories.

Can I also just say I hate telling people all the things I do? I heard a quote once to the effect of "Don't tell everyone what a hard worker are: let the evidence of your work be your testimony." I try to live by that rule as much as possible. I suppose this translates into yes-tourettes: I have a hard time saying no, because I have a harder time saying, "I can't because I'm so busy blah blah blah understand my struggle, say nice things because you pity my over-commitment blah blah blah."

Here is how September went for me:
Curtis: You have a blog, right?
Me: A neglected one, yes.
Curtis: Have you heard about the 9x9x25?
Me: Ummm....
Curtis: [Explains the program.] And we give you prizes --like Ben&Jerry's.
Me: Ben&Jerry's, eh?
Curtis: You should do it!
Me: I'll think about it. Maybe.

That said, here is what I have learned about 9x9x25. I've learned that like Nanowrimo, budgeting time for me is a great outlet. I'll be honest: my Nanowrimo hasn't done so hot this year (I'll still catch up. It'll be okay. I think.), and it's nice to at least have something like 9x9x25 with weekly accountability and on-campus conversations about how the blogging is going. Because the thing that both of these writing hobbies shows me is that I need to budget time for me, too, and while it's easy to budget TV down time where I crochet and go brain-dead for as long as that episode lasts, it's also nice to nourish myself intellectually through the written word. (All of you more linear thinkers who see writing as a chore is probably scoffing, but it's true! Writing is my relaxation!)

Anyway, so here's to the 9x9x25 challenge! Woo hoo! Season complete, lessons learned, blog effectively uses as a venting tool, and I hope next year is as nourishing and inspiring.

9x9x25: Standards

“Yours is the only class I try in.”

 “I actually think in your class –like, use my brain and stuff.”

“I didn’t like English before your class.”

Of course I love to hear things like this, but there’s something that also concerns me about it. Because I teach seniors this year I hear more and more about the guidelines of “College Board”, a group that decides seemingly arbitrary standards for achievement. I say that the standards are seemingly arbitrary because students are expected to keep a 3.7 or higher GPA, on top of holding a position in a school club or organization for at least two years, on top of having a job outside of school, on top of having a number of volunteer hours.

My question is this: are we training our kids to have burnout at an earlier and earlier age?

I feel like the community college world has long been addressing the fact that our student seem to be getting dumber and dumber. If our high schools are demanding more and more from our students (and, arguably, if learning standards like Common Core are training students to engage their critical thinking skills at an earlier rate), then why does it seem that community college students are so underprepared?

“Miss Kauffman, I’m so overwhelmed with school right now. The college classes and sports…” She sighs and runs a hand through her hair. “My parents won’t let me quit soccer, but my grade is getting worse in math…” After a pause she says, “I’m so burnt out, I’m thinking I won’t even go to college. I’m so overwhelmed right now and everyone keeps saying that college will be harder. I don’t know. I don’t think I can handle it.”

Maybe I was able to at least convince her to go to Yavapai College (rather than to throw her education away) –but is that why our community college students seem so apathetic –because community college is the last option before completely quitting? Is that the reason why I get so many more excuses for not doing work at the community college level –because smart kids have decided they’re not high-achieving enough to compete with Ivy League-like standards for universities? And because tuition is rising at a staggering rate, demands for scholarships and grants are nearly impossible.

I suppose there is no answer to these questions, merely an observation. Teaching at a college prep high school at the same time as teaching at a community college presents a great opportunity to talk about college readiness, to try and make that transition as smooth as possible. Sometimes at the end of the day, though, we forget that these high school kids are still just kids, that as high-achieving as they are they still just want to laugh while their teacher raps Hamilton for them. If they can laugh and have a good time (in addition to working , of course) they can forget about their goals and standards –for an hour, at least.

Blog #8

Blog assignment #8: How prepared do you feel in effectively teaching your students in reading?  Is this one of your strengths?  A weakness?

I love teaching students reading. Because I teach English at the college and high school levels, I consider teaching reading to be one subject of many components. One component is vocabulary, one component is a variety of different syntax and structures, and one component is practicing that reading, both aloud and silently. See, reading isn’t just about phonetically translating something from a paper into spoken words or thoughts, but it’s about understanding what you read.  I don’t care if a student has the ability to run their eyes over words if after that they don’t remember or understand what they’ve read.

I would like to hope that teaching reading is one of my strengths. Sometimes I read to them and they take notes on what they read (and they really take notes –they don’t doodle and claim it’s note-taking), and sometimes I “pass the pug” (toss a pug beanie baby) as popcorn reading so that they take turns. If I’m teaching something that contains older language (Shakespeare, The Federalist Papers), I’ll stop after a foggy paragraph and say, “What does this mean?” For one of my junior classes, there is a moment of crickets after I ask this, after which I always add something about how reading “17^th and 18^th century literature a learning outcome for your grade. I don’t care if it’s 100% accurate, but I do care to see you reason your way through the meaning. What do you think this is about? Prove to me that you understand.” Because I teach at a college prep high school of high-achieving students, this is usually enough to spur them on; after all, one mustn’t be considered below average! So as in the case with yesterday’s lesson, students would look at the gigantic paragraph, pick a few operative words (I’ve trained them to look for “the most powerful words in the sentence”), and then to talk themselves through it based on the intuition they have in the text along with their comprehension of the vocabulary. I love days like this: it proves to me that they’re not apathetic or complacent in my class.

Have you started to plan to the Common Core Standards?  If you have, how is that going?  If you haven’t, why not?  What support do you need?

When I started teaching at the high school level last year, I built my lessons around the Common Core Standards. When I taught at a different charter high school in 2012, there was the AIMS standards that I taught to with much more structure in those projected lessons. For example, when teaching Revolutionary War-era literature, the AIMS standards included recommended authors to read, recommended poems and short stories, recommended pieces of art to tie in, and recommended vocabulary words. I loved that format and while I understand the impetus behind the Common Core Standards structure in their deviation from this, it was also tremendously helpful. To that end, I attempt to draft units that appeal to both: I use the recommendations from those units (or at least what I remember from them, since I seem to have lost those hardcopy documents) with the learning outcomes and standards from Common Core. To extend my Revolutionary War example, we still read Phyllis Wheatley’s poem about George Washington, and Longfellow’s poem about Paul Revere. We still study what an aphorism is, since we also read a selection from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. Our vocab list is comprised of words in The Declaration of Independence and James Madison’s Federalist 10. While the structure is taken from AIMS, I’m still appealing to Common Core Standards with regard to reading and analyzing information, with interpreting 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th century literature.

At the end of the year, we put together what’s called our “purple folder” where we put together a number of educational reports to prove to our specific school board that we have upheld our end of the contract. One such category of our portfolio includes providing Common Core Standards and proving that we uphold those standards. Last year for the portfolio, I broke down every standard and provided a lesson that spoke to that standard. I have often thought about providing every lesson that speaks to that standard (more for my own reference than for the board’s) but I have yet to do so since it really is a lot of work –not that I’m adverse to hard work, but when I spend 20 hours a week at my house grading on top of a 40 hour workweek (not to mention responsibilities for Rio classes, YC classes, and Nanowrimo group organization) it’s hard to add one more thing to my list.

9x9x25

Anxiety.

I have it.

Last Monday, I called out of work and had to cancel class because I caught some kind of weird stomach flu. This is what comes to mind:

If you know your body well enough, you know when the illness you've gotten is simply your body's way of saying, "Slow down. We need to take some time." I'm fairly certain this is what happened, and this is also that moment when you as a person who wonders if you feel normal says to yourself, "Maybe it's just in my head. I need to reject these feelings, push through, and I'll be fine."

But then that validating moment happens when one of your peers says, "How are you feeling?" and after a bit of a back-and-forth, you realize that you both had the same symptoms: dizziness, light-headedness, stomach cramping. (Usually right about here is where a polite person declines to provide more details about their illness.) "Oh," you think to yourself, "it's not in my head after all."

And --you've been here-- the second you realize that being sick isn't in your head, the floodgates of permission open and now because you think you're somehow more "allowed" to feel sick, you start paying attention to your symptoms in a cataloguing way that formulates a balance sheet of whether these feelings justify whether you can call out or not. You make the replacement lesson plans, you email all of the necessary people, your administrative assistant puts the "Class Cancelled" notice on the door, you email your students in a mass email, you feel the heart-wrenching reality of being deducted pay for being sick, and as you fall back on the couch you tell yourself that it's worth it to pay to be sick.

This is my question: is this kind of stomach flu passed along with bacteria so advanced that it knowingly seeks out teachers only? Because based on the conversations I've had around campus since then, only teachers seem to have been plagued by this particular virus. And here's another question: should we change our Web-MD description of the stomach flu to match work-based stress and anxiety? Because the similarities are suspicious.

It seems only teachers get this illness, teachers who are "over-worked and under-paid", teachers who always tell young, fledgling teachers that "your students should always be working harder than you are" --okay, if that's true, than how come it's only the teachers getting the anxious flu? Going one step further in seeing the world through a creative writer's lens, this is the stuff theme is made of. The creative writer in me pictures an allegory where only teachers get a certain kind of illness, a story not altogether different from Blindness by Jose Saramago (if you haven't read it, you need to) where there will be one noble person with the answer and thus change the fate of society as we know it. This is a writeable allegory, and in it I could tell a new version of the oft-told tale...

...or maybe I'll have to do that later. I have a lot of catch-up I have to do from calling out sick.

7th Webinar Blog Response

1.How is your portfolio progress? Did you upload your Code of Ethics? Contact Information Form? Student Teaching Questionnaire? Welcome Letter to Students and Parents? Teaching as a Career Letter?

Upon reading this list, I feel completely delinquent. I didn't know that all of these things are required for the portfolio. Where would I get a list of things required, including an explanation for these things? I feel like the TIR Program has great ambitions for creating measurable assessments to make sure that teachers are off to a great start, but I also feel like in the eight months I've been part of this program, it's been a never ending series of leap frogging from putting out one fire to another. I think with all of the intelligent minds organizing this program, someone could figure out a way to synthesize and stream line all of our requirements in a way that a student can understand at the offset of the program what is required of us. Anyone who has been a teacher longer than a week understands that our entire professional life is a series of putting out small fires (grading, dealing with parent issues, dealing with student issues, planning what lesson will come next, then the whole vicious cycle all over again) so sometimes one more fire to put out (much less a list like I have here) feels completely overwhelming. It almost feels like a cruel joke that we're enrolled in classes that show us what we need to do as teachers to make our learning environment as comfortable and successful as possible --and then the Rio learning environment doesn't appeal to its own recommendations. Sorry for the rant, and I know it's not any one person's fault, but it's really frustrating as a student to understand what is expected of me when it feels like so much of our expectations have been conveyed through seemingly missed deadlines.

2.Do you have one of your progress reports uploaded into your portfolio?

Again, I'm not really sure what is expected here. One of my own personal progress reports? (If so, where do I get that?) Or a progress report that is a grade I give a student? (If so, isn't that a FERPA violation?)

Webinar 5: Special Education Students

What are you going to do to meet the needs of your special education students?

Last year, I had way more special education students than I do this year. This year, the only special education students I have come with 504s more than IEPs. One student, for example, struggles with ADHD and needs to be able to get up and walk around. Another student has high anxiety and therefore needs to be able to have a note-card for any quiz or test I give not out of an intention to use it or a crutch, but as a backup in case the test anxiety gets so overwhelming that he needs an escape plan. Another student struggles with social anxiety and because pep-talks in the mirror help, she needs to be able to go to the bathroom if she feels overwhelmed. I am happy to meet each one of these needs. So far, not one single student has needed to take these tasks up to help in class, but it's really important that they have them available in case they need them.

Interestingly, I have a student who is on the spectrum, but her parents refuse to acknowledge her need. I guess it's not that surprising, because I've seen this before at another school. I can see where the parents hesitate to help her out of a preoccupation with stigma. While there is no 504 or IEP for this student, I have adopted my own kind of IEP --not to the point of altering curriculum, but at least in altering my own interaction with her to best meet her needs. For example, she is someone who will always need more time for questions, so I adjust for more question time. Because I learned early on in teaching that different kinds of learners need directions given in different ways, I may give the same set of directions in different phrases, but I always connect with her after class to make sure she understood the assignment in one way or another. She doesn't do well with any abstract thinking, so whenever I give a prompt for bellwork that is more creative, I stop by her desk to make sure she understands directions.

Most of what she struggles with are things that are outside of the curriculum. She struggles with eye contact, though she's getting better. When she's aggravated by a subject, she tends to growl and snap at teachers, so sometimes I have to remind her to speak respectfully. If she struggles with finding something, she expects me to do the work for her, and I imagine she has had parents and teachers who have --for her entire upbringing-- identified that she struggles so it's just easier to do it for her. I'm trying to break that expectation by leading her through steps of logical reasoning, allowing her to find the information herself without my spoon-feeding her because it's the easiest option right now. I think that's probably the biggest struggle because she wants to be instantly gratified (don't they all?), but I'm trying to show her that it is within her power to seek out answers to her own questions and therefore to show her she has more choice and agency than others have allowed her to think. Isn't that what teaching is all about?

Webinar 4 Blog Post: [In Joey Voice] How You Doin'?

We're standing outside of Waffles 'n' More, my friend gives me a hug, we exchange the obligatory "how are you"s, and then she asks, "How was this week at school?"

My response: "I had some really awesome moments, and I had moments of living hell. So, I guess it averaged out to okay?"

This week's blog prompt is the following: How are you feeling emotionally, physically? Do you feel that you're getting through to your most difficult students? What strategies are working? What strategies are not? What are your next steps with student engagement in your classroom?

I could focus on the parts that made my week a living hell --but I won't. We've all dealt with them: students who have to come to grips with the fact that it's October and they're failing. In the k-12 world, we have a special monster: the parents who have to come to grips with their child failing. Unfortunately, though parents have high-school-aged students, they often can't fix their student's problems as easy as they once did. Talking to the teacher can be a temporary fix, maybe for one assignment, but the overall problem is that their student is making a series of bad choices, and high school is the eve of the college and career world. Are those bad choices going to mean success for your child outside of this classroom? Nope. Sorry. I'm not going to sugar-coat it for you. I'm not going to sugar-coat it for your student. We might be moving toward a world of "safe zones" but the straight up truth is that some kids aren't ready for the world --and, yes, sometimes I bear the brunt of being that news. Whatever. No one became an English teacher because they wanted to be the most popular kid in the class.

I don't want to chat about that in this blog post. We see enough of that as it is --at both the high school and college level. What I do want to talk about is the overwhelming exhaustion of making class great for your kids. Last Tuesday, I had a new one for my repertoire: I rapped "Alexander Hamilton" for my Junior English class, and in case you've been living under a rock for the last 11 months, it's from Hamilton: The Musical, a Broadway Tony-winner (they won 11 Tony's recently?) where Lin-Manuel Miranda argues that our first Treasurer of the Secretary embodies all of the essential elements of a hip-hop lifestyle. I know. It's conceptual. And it's amazing.

Mine was not a Tony-winning performance. Here, check it out: https://youtu.be/uiz8xDnJXVI

So how am I feeling physically? Um, let's try exhausted. It takes a lot to be able to rap at that pace and at that volume for a room full of kids, let alone the stress of anticipation, let alone stage fright, let alone the excitement of the starved theater kid, let alone all of the other work for all of my other classes I put in on top of it. I've been singing this song at the top of my lungs in drives from point A to point B for months hoping that it would be amazing. Guess what: the first time I performed this for 4th hour (not filmed), it was horrendous. There's a kind of defeat that goes into anticipation failing (which I might add resembled my failing breath control halfway through the song. Whatever.). But there's also a kind of "whatever" energy that goes into this performance in 5th hour. After all, it can only be better.

So how am I feeling emotionally? Pretty amazing --because all of those other questions about reaching students? Yeah. I did that. This year's juniors are of a particular brand of apathetic, a particular brand of quiet, a particular brand of withdrawn. To make things worse, each Junior English class has 30 kids in it, which means while I have one half of the room spellbound, the other half isn't paying attention and class is therefore a juggling act of which half I'm engaging.

But this --I got them with this. The kids that couldn't connect to me before do now. The kids that were apathetic before pay attention now. I don't think mine is their favorite class (or even that they have a favorite class), but at least now when they sit down, I have their attention. Maybe it's temporary, maybe I'll only have their attention for the next few days as long as they wonder when I'll pop out with a rap again, but that's okay. I have a few days to strike while the iron's hot, to talk about the Age of Enlightenment like it's important --because it is, because it is something they can relate to whether they know it or not, because individualism is important and their voice is important.

So am I tired? Yep, but welcome to the life of a teacher. I can handle it, and if it takes rapping for the kids to get their attention, I'm down. It won't be great, but who says it has to be? They could see that I was real with them, and that I was authentic in wanting to connect with them. I did it. Isn't that enough?

Part of my week were a living hell. You'll never make some people happy. But there are some weeks when you will make people happy, and it's okay to revel in that moment. And because I'm feeling the hip-hop vibe, boom.