Fear & Anxiety: Can I really do this?

I have been having bad dreams. Not nightmares, per se, but just unpleasant dreams. The dreams have been about beginning my position as a full-time English teacher next fall. I do not know why I have so much anxiety about starting this position. I feel that although I have much room to grow in my journey towards excellent teaching, I have done a good job this year in my student teaching. I guess deep down, I fear that I will be inadequate. Teaching is such a huge responsibility. Am I up to the task? The people who hired me believe that this is so, but deep down I have serious reservations. How do I teach literature when I often struggle to make meaning out of the texts myself? How do I teach writing without expecting students to write in my own voice? How do I prepare over a hundred students to become productive members of society? I do not want to fail my students because in failing them, I fail myself.

Sentence Structure Cont'd

On Friday I met with the student who had problems constructing sentences. The meeting went better than I thought it would. The student came, with a distressed look on her face. I did what I could to put her at ease. I told her that although there was a problem with the sentences in her paper, learning how to correct fragment and run-on sentences was a relatively easy problem to fix. I whipped out a grammar worksheet on senteces and went over the definition of a sentence with her. I told her that a sentence has three requirements; it must have a subject and a verb, and it must express a complete thought. I told her that her main problem was that she had several complete thoughts in a single sentence. I asked her to read the first paragraph of her paper to me aloud. This way I could hear whether she blended all the words into a monotonous sentence or accounted for the breaks in thought in her mind. As she read, she paused in the middle of her sentences. I pointed out that pauses indicate that a period or a comma should be included because a complete thought has been expressed. I went over where the periods should be in her first paragraph, and then had her review the rest of her paper on her own. Although she still had a few run-on sentences in the end, she had greatly improved. I could see from this improvement that she was beginning to understand where one thought ended and the next began. I thought that our meeting was successful.

I saw a great lesson today. My MT is doing a unit on how to give a formal speech. The unit is building up to an "authentic assessment" in which students must give a speech about an injustice in the community to the community. Naturally, students are feeling very nervous about this unit. My MT is carefully scaffolding each lesson to prepare students to reach their ZPD. Today MT made copies of "The Three Little Kittens"and had students practice public speaking with it. She had the class divide into two groups and line up facing each other. The students were then to alternate reading a page of the story to each other. Students were to practive, eye contact, posture, breathing, tone, and volume. After the pairs finished reading the story, she had students rotate and practice again with another student. Each time students rotated, they were to focus on a different aspect. By the fourth round, most students had improved. After the activity she had them debrief by saying what, if anything, they got out of the lesson. Many students said it helped them feel more comfortable making eye contact. Other students said it helped them become better readers. Other students said that they learned that the practice helped them memorize the material. Only one student said she got nothing out of the activity, but she could not articulate why she did not like it.

I think this is a great activity that helps students get hands-on experience, allows them to interact with one another, and promotes teamwork. I would definitely adapt this lesson for my classroom in the future.

Sentence Structure

Today I graded a student's essay. The paper left me frustrated. The assignment was to write a persuasive essay complete with a thesis. The essay did not have a thesis, and therefore was not persuasive. This, however, was the least of the problems with the paper. The paper lacked cohesive sentences. Thoughts were chopped up and blended together into a puddle of words on the paper. I am really concerned for this student. I wonder how she got this far writing at this level.

I pulled the student aside today and asked her if she could meet me during study hall tomorrow to talk about her essay. She agreed. I want to intervene to help this student move forward in her academic and writing endeavors, but I do not know where to start. I pulled some explanations from a grammar workbook on sentence structure. The activities focus on defining what a sentence is and identifying and correcting fragment and run-on sentences. I want to be careful not to overwhelm the student, though. I can only imagine that writing was hard for her to begin with.

Is a grammar lesson the best approach? How else do I get her to see and understand what the problem is? Should I start with her paper instead and see if she recognizes the problem? I am really confused. I know there may not be a magical, overnight solution to her writing difficulties, but I am eager to help. I just don't want to take the wrong approach and risk losing her altogether.

Authentic Assessment

In the EROD for my three-day solo, my master teacher wrote a criticism that I think is still applicable. She wrote: “Shannon has an emerging grasp how to develop an instructional plan. She should include extending the lesson to include community outreach.” This criticism is accurate. My curriculum and instruction professor always encourages his students to make assessments “authentic.”

My master teacher's criticism is very appropriate. I want to give my students opportunities to do meaningful things and to extend their learning outside of the classroom. I was feeling pretty good about my teaching approach. But after my master teacher's comment, I realized that I was confusing engaging for authentic. They are not the same thing.

In the future I want to have students go out into the community and become leaders. Talking about leadership within the walls of the classroom is much different from pushing students to go "outside the walls" and put leadership to the test. For example, for my Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry unit I could have had students identify an injustice in society and find an organization in the community that is working to address the problem. As an assessment of their emerging leadership and writing skills, I could have had students keep a journal and give a presentation to the community about the problem.

Truthfully, I am too exhausted and stretched thin to be able to take my teaching to the next level. I feel bad about saying this. I do not want to shortchange my students. I do not understand where teahers find the time to do these types of things with their students.

How do I motivate this student?

There is onestudent in my class who comes consistently, butt does not do any work. He loves to sit in class and draw. He is rarely disruptive or disrespectful. Initially I found myself repremanding him at least twice daily. Icouldtell that he was beginning to resent me, and my reprimands were accomplishing nothing. I decided to try a different approach because I did not want all of our interactions to be negative ones. I started greeting him (and others) when he arrived to class and asking him questions about his day or weekend. During class, rather than reprimanding him for drawing, I would take an interest in whathe was doing, but ask him to put it away and participate. When it was time to complete work during class I would ask him if he wanted help. I encouraged him whenever he did the slightest amount of work. This helped us develop a better relationship, but did not help motivate him to do work. This has gone on all quarter. Last Friday, the classwas working on writing business letters to people in the community who have power to change things that are unjust in the community. Students had been working on the letters for two weeks. They had chosen their topics, completed research on the topics, identified stakeholders, outlined the letter, and written a first draft. This student had not done any of the work. The day before starting the unit, I learned that the student had been harassed by the police in his neighborhood. The police stopped him and his friends because they looked like suspects of a crime. In addition to handcuffing the youth, the police drew their guns on them. My student did not seem traumatized by theevent, but he was upset about the way he and his friends were treated. I suggested that he write a letter to the police chief about the incident if he felt comfortable and safe enough to do so. Two weeks went by and he still had takenno steps to complete the work. On Friday I checked in with him while he was at his desk drawing. He told me he did not have a topic, and I brought up the incident as a possible topic. He said he was interested in the topic. I asked him to write down a sentence describing his opinion on the topic. I gave him a couple of minutes alone to do so, but when I returned, he still had blank paper and had returned to drawing. I then sat there with him, and asked him to verbalize his opinion tome. He did this. When I asked himto write it down, he hesitated. It seemed as though he may have a lot of trouble with writing. I am really ata loss as to how to help this student. I would like to sit down with him and work with him, but getting him to follow through has been unsuccessful. What should/could I do?

I Got A Job!

I got a job! Yeah!!! As you can tell, I am very excited. I have been trying to balance my student teaching and my other 4 jobs while searching for a full time job next fall. It has been stressful and physically and emotionally draining. Now, I can stop stressing.

Although I won't name the school on this "public" blog that no one other than the person who normally responds to my blogs reads, I will describe it. It is a charter school (yeah!) in SF. It has about 450 students enrolled; students seem to very diverse. If you know me at all, you know that I am passionate about youth empowerment and social justice -- things that this school is also committed to. The stafff seem great and very self-critical in their approach to education. I am very excited to work there.

Interviewing for this job, and others was nerve wracking. After the initial interview, I was invited to do a model lesson in front of a group of students. This was very intimidating. I get nervous when my University Supervisor comes out to observe and evaluate. It's even worse when it is a strange group of students, their normal teacher, and the principal of the school.

The teacher asked me to do a background lesson on the Vietnam War. Students were midway through a book on the war but had learned little about the war outside of the book. I was excited to do it, but also scared bc I had never studied the war. I was able to talk to the teacher in person and ask her questions about the class. I asked her how many students were in the class, whether students attended regularly, whether students worked well in groups, whether students liked to talk in class. I appreciated the opportunity to discuss these issues, because in my student teaching experience, a great lesson can go terribly wrong if it is not the right lesson for the class.

I did some library research and spent way too much time planning the lesson. But since this was for a job, I figured it made sense to go all out. I turned the classroom into a Vietnam War museum. I had 6 exhibits: 1) African Americans and the War; 2) Guerilla Warfare; 3) the My Lai Massacre; 4) Anti-War protest; 5) Guerilla Warfare; and 6) Personal Artifacts (my father is a Vietnam War Vet). I brought in a Marvin Gaye Song, a Clip from the movie Forrest Gump, pictures, a power point slide show on the massacre, letters, poetry, facts, and some of my dad's old war stuff. It turned out to be a great lesson. Students were really engaged, and said that they learned a lot. I was very pleased. I walked away feeling that even though I spent way too much time on this lesson, it might be good to spend way too much time on a lesson every now and again. Students really liked it. It was interactive, multi-media, appealed to different learning styles, and out of the box. (I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but I'm proud of it). Seeing their reaction and their reflections showed me that the time spent was well worth it. I even had fun creating the lesson and learning about a war I knew virtually nothing about.

My other model teaching lesson at the other school was horrible. It was an example of a good lesson gone bad because it was not right for the class dynamics. Although to my credit, I knew nothing about the classroom dynamics before going in. I tried to ask the questions above, but after telling me they would get back to me with that information, I never heard back. They also scheduled the interview the day before, so I had less time to prepare. Since I had no idea what they were learning before the day of my interview, my lesson was also a random lesson. In sum, the lesson was painful. I wanted to disappear. I left,however, knowing that I did not want to work at that school because I felt they (the principal and the teacher) were inconsiderate and lacked good communication skills.

I am happy that I do not have to do anymore model lessons in front of complete strangers.

Rantings of an Educator

Rantings of an Educator:

Schools in urban ghettos
Are not set up to educate or habilitate
Children with brown skin or thin pockets
They help circulate brown bodies
Onto dirty streets where cold steel waits
To meet red hearts that stopped hoping long ago.

Nobody knows what to do.
How will we care for students who don’t want to be there?
How do we motivate students who have been nurtured
By hate?
Students who aint concerned with teachers
Tellin em aint aint a word
When little grammatical blurbs cannot reason
With a student that sees no reason
to care about him or herself?

How do we convince young women
Who quote lil Kim like the Bible,
That sex is not a religion?
That livin to get a man, or rather a boy
Imitatin a man,
Aint really livin.
That when you have children at 14
It becomes more likely that
Dreams of happily ever after remain just dreams
That fade soon after that after sex glow
she probably doesn’t even know
Because that boy is only concerned with his ejaculation.

We are educating a nation of children
Who will grow and never know their history
about our ancestors who were kings and queens in Africa
Before they were snatched and attacked
And packed like sardines on a ship
Where half of them died
And the half that made it cried out to God
To intervene and end death
So they could live in heaven.

Our children never know
that their parents
And grandparents have dreams
Of seeing their children own nice things
Because their parents spend all their time in fields
Trying to sow those dreams
In soil that grows
Food that never seems to reach the table.

Our children do not realize
that they are victims of viscous lies
that tell them they are inferior.
We give them standardized tests
That tell them they are substandard and subhuman.
Testers do not acknowledge that discrepancies exist
Because there is no standard.
Because testers want to maintain
Their standard of living
For themselves and their kids.
Because students scoring low
Live in sub-standard houses
Where there is no heat for the heart
And no food for thought.
Because the status quo should never fall below
shades of white on pie graphs
that show what black
Brown
and Red students do not know;
and hides the lies that schools are fixed to lift
those who are rich
and white
and some brown tokens
who were let through to prove
what gatekeepers have been saying all along –
that anybody can succeed
if they try.

Sometimes I sit and cry
Because I don’t know why life is like this
For little kids who deserve the world.
I want to teach little girls
that they have pearls and gems in their minds.
I want to teach little boys
That guns are not toys
And that life is precious.
I want my students to learn
Their stories
Not his - story
About how he discovered and conquered a land of savages
And how his hand crafted a plan
That expands freedom to all men
Who were created and treated equal.

I cannot teach these lies
To children who know equal is a sugar
To sweeten the bitterness of reality.
Teachers have to stop
Perpetuating untruth to our youth
We must unveil and correct discrepancies
So that children can have
Positive mentalities
And see their fantasies of other people’s realities come true.

Should reading be assigned?

As you may know, I am teaching two classes of struggling readers. Many of them are at a third grade reading level. The book we were reading, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, is a fifth or sixth grade level book, but most of the class struggled to decode several words on each page. My dilemna is whether to assign any reading for homework. My instinct is to do all of the reading as a class -- this way, we can discuss the book as we encounter the difficult passages. However, reading the book in this way is so slow. Our classes are only an hour and ten minutes. It takes about that long to get through about ten pages, on a good day. With so much in-class reading, it is then difficult to do any engaging activities in class. In addition, it takes forever to get through the book. By the time we get into the book, many students are tired of it.

I have assigned reading a couple times, but most of the class did not complete the reading. The next day in class, only two students responded to the reviewquestions. One of those students had read the book in middle school and was answering from memory; the other student did the reading for homework. Since no one did the homework, the lesson flopped.

Toward the end of last quarter, with five chapters left to go, I broke the class into five small cooperative groups to complete a final project. Each group was assigned to cover one chapter we read as a class, and one chapter we had not read. The groups were responsible for reading the chapter on their own. Many of the students did the reading, but there were still at least five or six that did not do the reading, and depended on their classmates to summarize the plot for them.

I realize that they are struggling readers, and that reading may not be enjoyable for them, but how do I get them to read on their own so that we can do more interesting things in class? Should I be trying to do this, or should I just be focusing on reading in class, and let the other English teachers do the engaging activities?

When did students stop doing homework?

The quarter ends Friday and ten of my students are failing. That's a little less than half the class. They are not failing because they lack the skills necessary to be successful in my class; they are failing because I lack the homework assignments with which to give them points.

I reminded them two weeks ago that grades would be due soon and gave them each their current grade. I told them that they should make up their work. Nobody came to me to get missing assignments. I reminded them last Monday that eleven people were failing, and that they have exactly one week to make up any missing work. I gave each of them their current grades again. A total of six people came to see me about their missing assignments. I am curious to see how many assignments I will receive today. I am skeptical that I will get many. I feel bad saying that because that makes me feel as though I have low expectations for my students, but based on the current pattern of not turning in assignments, I will be happy if any of the ten makes up their work.

One one hand, I do not want to fail any student. On the other hand, if a student refuses to put in the work necessary to succeed, even after gaining the academic tools to do so, the student deserves to fail. I want to prepare my students to succeed in life. Maybe I failed miserably this quarter. Maybe I am oblivious to their academic needs. How do I know whether I am oblivious? If I teach a lesson, I assign homework, classwork, or tests to assess what they learned. Assessment is very diffficult when students refuse to take the assessments.

One solution might be to not assign homework. However, would that be giving way to low expectations? My students will not do homework, therefore I should accept that bleak reality and do something else? The real world is not like that. As much as I do not want to be a cog in the wheel of capitalism, students live in a capitalist society and must be productive. If they are not productive, they will not survive. I am trying to teach them survival skills. Students will not survive if they cannot perform on the job, whatever their job may be.

Maybe I am preparing them fo life in a capitalist society. As low income students of color, they go to a school that severely lacks resources. It is an alternative high school for students who have been expelled, dropped out, and been arrested, tried, and convicted. These students have had an educational history of being underserved. They are all bright and have all the potential in the world to reach their apex. However, everything works against them -- their lack of wealth, their skin color, their lack of academic skills, their experiences growing up in communities plagued with violence, drugs, and death. I became an educator and youth advocate to help youth succeed in spite of all that works against them. It is difficult to do this, sometimes, as an employee of an institution of capitalism. In order to thrive, capitalism needs people at the bottom. It needs people at the bottom so that the people at the top has something, or someone, to stand on. This society was founded on slave labor. In the absence of slavery, the country has sustained itself with cheap, and sometimes, undercover slave labor. Without that cheap and sometimes slave labor, this country would crumble. At least or socioeconomic system would. I am down for that to happen, but I often feel that I cannot change the system of oppression by working for the system of oppression. As a teacher in a public school, I am an agent of the government. So by having high expectations for my students, am I a double agent?

Buenos Tardes Muchachos

Buenos Tardes Muchachos. This is my new blog spot. A month ago I didn't even know what a blog was. Actually, I'm still not quite sure. It's kind of cool, though. I hope to exchange interesting ideas with you over the course of this semester.
Peace to the homies,
HH