THE END

Well, after spending a summer desperately pleading for a job in Western Washington, I gave up on teaching. I know I'm not owed a job, but I do feel that after ten years of working with children, I should be eligible to get an entry level job doing something other than substitute teach for $15,000 a year with no benefits.
This past week, I took a job in tech support and data analysis for a school district. The job pays better than teaching, and it pays hourly- meaning my whole life won't be wasted away by meetings. Turns out, the vocational education I got in high school was worth more than the 6 years it took me to get a degree and a license. So my teaching career is over before it begins. I have no interest in begging someone for a job that hard. I have no interest in begging anyone for any job. I enjoyed the work, but I cannot tell you what a relief it is to know that I never have to endure that kind of abuse and stress again. I guess I was just a poor kid who went to school for the only thing I had any experience in.
I'll still be working a couple hours a day at a Boys and Girls Club teaching reading/writing/arithmetic because I enjoy it, and they have the decency to pay me a respectable wage.

I made it out alive!

After 5 months of 70 hour weeks, I have made it through student teaching alive and in one piece. I've been decompressing, and dealing with the viral bronchitis I was given as a parting gift.
I plan on keeping this blog afloat and discussing my job prospects, and whatever my future job will be.
But, consider it dead for the summer!

Week's worth of postings

4-3-08

Yet another test today. Middle school teaching is great- assigning the test today effectively provided me with a day long planning period. I've got my grading completely up to date, with the exception of today's test, and it's on a scantron so grading will be effortless. I've used the time thus far to plan tomorrow, Monday, and I believe I'll complete the bellwork for all of next week before the day is out. I'm stressing my planning on applying mathematical concepts we're studying to "real-world" sort of scenarios. I'm also trying to lighten the atmosphere a little by breaking up the monotony with a little activity, etc. I want my students to have more independence. I do not want to spend my whole day asking so and so to sit down, stay on task, etc. I want to talk a little at first, set an activity in motion, and then step back and work on planning the following week.

4-7-08

Time is continuing to fly past. This job is really pretty easy now that I am more comfortable with it. My second coop teacher has taught me a lot about how to manage a class in a less labor intensive way than the last one did. Grades are posted online so students can track their progress daily, quizzes are mostly computerized and done on the student's time in a two week window, etc. Next week will be TCAPs- meaning I have no planning to do. That's such a wonderful thing.

I assigned homework today, to much weeping and gnashing of teeth. My coop teacher told me not to do it. I thought maybe I'd learn something from trying it. We'll see.

4-8

Did a little coin toss probability thing today. In general, I think it was a good thing for my class. But there was one problem. One ugly, nasty problem. I did not expect flipping a coin 100 times, working with the data, doing a bellwork problem, etc. would get done so quickly. Idle hands in the classroom spell disciplinary problems, and classroom management happens to be my weakest area. So I spent a little too much time screaming all day. From now on, I need a backup plan for every single activity. Some sort of quiz, test, etc.

4-14

TWO WEEKS LEFT! TCAPS start tomorrow- this week is going to be really, really annoying. I loathe trying to manage and control behavior all day, and that sounds like what i get to do. So I'll only get one week of fun stuff to do afterwards. I hesitate now to do anything that they claimed to be interested in, because I don't know if I believe they could behave themselves long enough for me to get it done. I'll give it a swing on the first day or two and see.

Saddest Student Story EVER

From 3-31
Today I was talking to one of my Sudanese students about her life. Since I've known a lot of Sudanese immigrants, I know there's always an amazing story to be had if you ask the right questions. The long and short of it is: When she was born, her tribe threw her out on a rocky hill for the lions to eat because something was wrong with her. So that night her mother snuck out and got her, and ran away. She ran right into the wars in southern Sudan/central africa, and grew up in refugee camps.
Now she's moved here to a horrible town in TN that must seem like paradise. I have absolutely unlimited patience for this child because I am so happy that she is alive, and she is so happy to learn. But she knows nothing of the material that's required of her. And it's not like she can get testing in Dinka to see if she qualifies for special services...
Still I have spent time after school with her daily going over material, and going all the way back to where her knowledge begins to try and scaffold her up. That's so much of what tutoring work really is- going to material lower than is available and making sure that a solid foundation exists for new knowledge. That's hard to do when your education didn't even begin until you were 12.

April Fool's Day

So, only 4 weeks left- already. As soon as I get into a placement that feels like it might be teaching me something, it'll be done. I taught most of the day today- Monday I just felt too rusty and unprepared. Things went pretty well- though I still feel mostly clueless about how to discipline this age group. We got a smartboard- a bluetooth device that lets me write on the computer screen wirelessly. So far I can see it helping a lot with classroom management, because I no longer have to interact physically with the board to get things done. I simply walk toward a disciplinary issue and it fades away most of the time.
The discipline system at this school is so dumb. It's in four stages like they typically are. 1)warning 2)educational assignment 3)detention 4)removal to the dean. There's one glaring problem: it doesn't restart, at all. So while I need to be issuing warnings or detentions, I can only go to the next step or higher- not lower. It makes no sense, and it leaves me feeling powerless most of the time.

Spring Break!

I can officially see the end of all of this... whether I'd call it a light or not, I dunno. I took total control of the class Thursday. I think that was ahead of the schedule, but I doubt anybody will care. I love the group of kids I am dealing with, I really do. They test my patience at times, but way less than I anticipated them doing.
My lesson on order of operations was going great until 3rd period came in and caught me doing something wrong with exponents. Now I remember why I hate math... I think they ended up more confused than they were before they came in. The rest of the periods went well. I'm learning much faster in a middle school environment than I did in an elementary school environment. Teaching the same lesson 6 times a day means that I get immediate feedback and make immediate changes- I like that. It does mean that 1st period gets shortchanged a lot, though.
Now it's a sunny day and I am eating sushi on my patio listening to records and writing this on my laptop- this might turn out to be the biggest perk ever. Time off is really all I want from a job- I want my time to yield the most money per hour worked possible. It doesn't concern me how much money is on my W2, the ratio is what really concerns me. I work at UPS with plenty of people who make 100K+, and I could have that. But the trade off is working 80 weeks every week- year round.
As it stands, I work that many hours. I had to start taking anti-depressants and my personal and work lives are in shambles. All to go teach a subject I have little to no interest in ever teaching professionally. Thanks for the memories, MTSU.

"Hi, I'm Your New Student Teacher"

Yesterday was the day I introduced myself to the class and set down my expectations. I also tried to pry some information out of the students about what they were interested in. I told them I'm not a math teacher, and they should help me come up with stuff to study after TCAP. Luckily, cooperating teacher says that they're all mine to do with as I please. It was a "you can take my interests- from my cold dead hands" kind of situation. Mostly them seem to enjoy sports and drinking red vault from a 2 foot long twizzler with the ends bitten off. Oh, and shock and indignation, they love that too.
discipline is going to take some getting used to...

Day 1 of New Placement

The new school is a much newer, better equipped building than I was prepared for.
The environment is much less regulated in some ways, but a lot more regulated in others.
The morning began with a daily dress-code check- all students stand and demonstrate that their shirt is tucked in and they are wearing a belt, etc. Many students simply tie a shoelace around their waist for whatever reason. Students are not allowed to carry anything but those dumb single pouch vinyl bags that are on strings. Athletic wear manufacturers design bags especially to sell to this market.
But then the kids are allowed to live on a diet of Vault and Cheetos, and the hallway is a deafening game of slap and tickle. It was St. Patrick's Day...ok it was to them, but nobody told them that the pope moved it to last Saturday. Try telling a middler schooler that when they are trying to pinch you. I only had one do it, I think he was the only one who was too dumb to understand my pinch-me-and-i-will-break-your-fingers posture.
Math seems like it will be easy to teach, it's so cut and dry. I've really never taught anything like that, so I hope that the new coop teacher has more material on file than it looks like she does. She says I can do anything I want with them after the TCAP... and thats just what I was hoping to hear.

Last Day of First Placement

This Wednesday was my last day. The kids gave me a lot of notes, my cooperating teacher gave me a briefcase, I got a card, etc. I didn't expect to get so attached to these kids so quickly. Now I am sitting in day two of tedious, but occasionally interesting presentations.
I finished the majority of my MTSU formalities. That feels good. The rest of them will be completed during spring break.

What I will do differently in my next placement:
start out tough on discipline.
get to know my students more quickly.
keep copies of my planning.
meet the administration and nearby teachers quickly.
grade students harder
demand more feedback from my cooperating teacher.

I am mortified by the prospect of teaching mathematics. My department has stalled me past having time to negotiate another placement. One of my classmates describes my next school as "a penitentiary."

In Mexico...

I have a number of Chicano students, and I love them dearly. For years as a kid, every afternoon playing video games with the mexican-americans up the street. I always joked with their mother that if she fed me any more, my own mother was going to get jealous.
As long as I can remember, I have gravitated toward immigrants of any stripe. I guess we share the alienated feeling. I'm not often accused of being easy to approach- quite the opposite in fact. But for whatever reason, immigrants have always gravitated to me.
We have this one "chapter book" in the class library Vampire Plague of Mexico, 1850- the book never gets checked out but it always gets looked at. And I don't want it to get checked out because it starts fantastic conversations like this one:

F: Mr.C Mr.C Mr.C Mr.C!
Me: WHAT!
F: My uncle told me that there are vampires in Mexico.
Me: That's what I've heard!
F: He says that they stick you with their claws this deep(holds up fingers) in the neck.
Me: Are you sure your uncle was not talking about a Chupacabra?
F: No, they scratch this deep (holds up fingers a little farther apart)

Or This one:

A: Did you know that in Mexico, they have witches and ghosts and Vampires?
Me: Yes I've heard they are having problems with them.
A: My Aunt has a witch that walks on her roof at night.
Me: That's creepy.
A: We tried throwing rocks at her but she keeps coming back.

Or My Favorite:

"My Aunt called my mom this morning. My cousin was riding his bike and he got attacked by a werewolf."

TEST TEST TEST

Everything I hated about working in a corporate environment is true about education and it
hit me only today. My friends who are IT professionals and the like constantly complain about long meetings, unrealistic goals, silly sounding pep-talks full/ of meaningless double speak, etc. I had my share of that kind of environment at UPS during school.
Everything we're doing comes back to test scores. The other day my teacher/ told me about a plan book she had gotten. The subject was building community, and she showed me some activities she had planned to help build community in her classroom. Sounds like a great idea! The student body seems to be really needy emotionally, and some semblance of family unit is exactly what the doctor ordered. Now, I don't doubt this woman's commitment for a second- she loves these kids like her own and they know it. But what she said next shook me to the core: "because studies show that building a community atmosphere can raise test scores." What has this environment done that has polluted the mind of even the most loving, selfless teacher I have ever known?
Yesterday we watched Underdog as a reward for those students who met xyz requirement for being one of the "good" kids. It bugged me to death to lose instructional time, but the kids seemed to enjoy it and honestly, they probably needed a break. Then after the film, they got a peptalk about how the principal wanted the students to be like the Underdog on the TCAP. We can't even watch a movie anymore...
This kind of environment feels so much like the corporate environment that I want to scream. I went into this because I wanted to be in a field that was not a selfish rat race. Instead, what I'm finding is that test scores have replaced profits. At least in a mindless, pointless race toward profit I might make money. As it is, I'm in a mindless, pointless race toward an increase in score on a test that I believe is fundamentally flawed.
All of my campus school profs told me not to worry about test scores- if I taught well, it would happen. But I really feel like displaying that attitude in the field would get me canned pretty quickly.

Why Standardized Testing Gets in the Way of Real Learning

I've been reading Brian Cambourne's Responsive Evaluation: Making Valid Judgments About Student Literacy in my evening spare time. Nothing particularly revolutionary about the book to me- but I have really enjoyed it. It's not that often that I read something I can use the next day.
As a teacher, I have two ways to teach material: I can parcel it out and micromanage it (that would produce the kind of spreadsheets and bar graphs that would really impress someone like a parent or a principal) or I can teach the material holistically. You can guess which of these methods I prefer.
As a teacher, I can't just teach the material that's on the standardized tests given by my state. No knowledge exists in isolation, and to teach it in isolation is essentially a memorization skill. Since my brightest students seem to do poorly in memorization, it's clearly not an effective measurement of student aptitude. When you teach things in isolation, or in the memorize-it way, you have to be mindful that you may be teaching the wrong thing unintentionally. I'm thinking of my wife and I's work teaching analogies: she and I both have the same problem. We've been asked to teach analogies to children that haven't yet gotten a handle on abstract thinking. Believe it or not, they are a second grade standard in a lot of states.
That's the real problem with standardized testing- it prevents us from A) Teaching to the ZPD of students, and B)Teaching holistically. It doesn't make a lot of sense to teach a progressive plan and then assess students in a conservative way. By locking in a mandatory conservative testing method, the state has locked in conservative methods. Methods which, by the way, have been proven ineffective for well over 50 years.
But the pressure is so intense on administrators, because of NCLB and state expectations, that criticizing this kind of testing in public could be tantamount to career suicide. The last thing a teacher would want an administrator to think is that they don't take standardized tests seriously. So we're completely prevented from having this discussion in the first place- and it's far to important to keep out of the public forum.

My Reading Program: It's Not Rocket Science

I'm sure I've probably mentioned how much I loathe the basal reader my students have. It's full to the brim with the most boring and tiresome tokenism- among other things.

So this week I started a new reading program: Read what you like to read. The first day was today, and I am already predicting a great success. Students are taking great interest in reading their books. My only requirement is that they submit a small book report on each book, just as proof that they read it.And because of course I need a massive, constant stream of grades to prove that I was doing...grading? Seriously, I'm tired of this mentality that everythingmust be assessed.)
We'll break things down into a short mini-lesson, and then some one on one reading remediation with each student. Just a quick way to counsel with them to see how they are progressing.
I really want this to work well. I can tell my cooperating teacher is highly suspicious. She favors the assessment-heavy approach of breaking reading down into tiny bits of skill to assess individually. I can see the logic in that- if I were designing a standardized test. But I want reading to be a "whole" skill that my students have. They could ace most of the standardized material if they could just read and think critically.

3 Day Weekends

Best invention of all time. Now I can put off all of my weekend work until monday morning, instead of Sunday night.
I came home this weekend with a backpack that weighed 50lbs. I don't resent grading at all. What I do resent is grading busywork. Work that we have assigned only to keep students busy- and that we grade only to make students prove they were busy.
I know I'm not supposed to penalize students' grades because of behavior. I fail to see how this is not exactly what I'm being asked to do.
It's really starting to grate on my nerves how little of my time is actually spent teaching. Between the parties and the walking in line and the recess and the PE and the dismissal and the "SIT DOWN" there's just not enough actual instruction going on. The school day needs to be about half the length it is. I'd rather teach the material with urgency, and go home.

Easier All the Time

I felt like garbage today. Seems like the flu shot and a handful of vitamins is just enough to keep me from calling in. I think I've felt this way for weeks now, too.
I walked in today, having been gone a couple days between a career fair(blah!) and a snow day (yay!)and find that one of the students who has been obsessed with my hair style since the day I walked in is now wearing that same hair style.
Since I'm learning to be sensitive to 5th grade egos, I chose not to say anything. But it looks great on the kid.
Teaching is getting a little easier as I make it more "mine" than it was before. I was not very good at stepping into my cooperating teacher's mold. I'm starting to feel a big conflict in our personality types on the horizon. She's so organization-minded, so into spending extra time(she's in on weekends and nights all the time) and I'm a lot more into getting everything I can out of a day. I remember how much I resented my teachers wasting my time. So when I design activities, or units, they don't sum up into multiple choice tests very well. And I hate multiple choice tests. I like essays, I like discussions, reports, art, music, presentations, etc.
Multiple choice tests are another way that public schools imprison the minds of young people. If you're creative enough to see more than one interpretation of a question, you're punished with indecision about it. When you bottle up creativity, it comes out looking like rage. And we wonder why our youth creative and enjoy such violent, angry art. What are they angry at?
They're angry at a great big machine that's smashing all the energy and creativity out of them- stealing their most active, energetic hours of the day and wasting it on something somebody at the state told your uneducated grandma they'd do so they could get elected.
And unfortunately, I get to be one tiny cog that's making that machine lurch forward over a cliff.
Being part of this system feels like driving nails with bananas. I know what it is I want to do, and I've got the energy. Feels like the right motion, but nothing is happening.