Endspurt

Actually, the title is German, but it's a great word to describe what's happening at this point. The TPA deadline and the end of the quarter at my placement school are both happening on the same day a week and a half from now. I have literally hundreds of reaction papers (about 11 per student, for 60 students) on To Kill a Mockingbird to grade by then, and the commentary on my TPA videos and the student assessments I chose to spotlight is due as well. Which do you think matters more to me?

My students' work, of course. What kind of a teacher would I be if my own grade on an assessment I don't really believe in was more important to me than my students' learning? It also helps to remind myself that I am in the final "beta phase" cohort, meaning that my TPA grade does not actually count towards me getting my license.

This is more evidence of how the TPA can actually prevent future preservice teachers from getting the most out of their student teaching experience. If I had been smarter about the TPA process (and I probably would have tried to be smarter, if it had been a factor in my licensure), I would not have assigned as much writing to my students this quarter. From the quality of the reaction papers I have read this morning, it's clear that this would have been detrimental to my students. They are making huge strides in their ability to think synthetically about literature, thanks (I believe) in large part to my insistence that they pause every couple of chapters and write at least 250 words about what they have read - and that they grapple with the text, as opposed to summarizing it. All the hours I have spent thus far writing comments like, "And what does this fact tell you about Scout? About Maycomb society? About the times Harper Lee is describing?" have had an effect. Those were all hours I could have spent filling out my 10-page commentary on the TPA assessment.

I don't want to bring my personal life too much into this blog, but another incident worth noting came up this week. I thought I had finished grading all of my students' comparison essay tests on Wednesday afternoon, but as I was entering the grades into the computer system I realized that I had not graded one essay. I put it aside to do that evening, once my daughter was asleep. After I had turned off her light and cuddled a bit with her and sung her current favorite lullaby, "The Ants Go Marching One by One," she wanted to cuddle some more. I obliged her for a few seconds, then whispered, "I have to grade another paper, sweetie."

"You have to put your daughter to bed, too," she reminded me tartly.

So much of the student teaching experience seems to be geared toward a nostalgic Hollywood version of what being a college student  is like; the TPA, in its current incarnation as a preservice teaching assessment, apparently buys into that. Maybe I am suffering from typical college student myopia, even though I am 51. But there really is not enough time in the day to fulfill all my obligations to my students and my family, much less to myself (and I consider the TPA an obligation to myself, because it is supposed to benefit my economic future). This is true even though I don't need more than six hours of sleep a night and can get by relatively comfortably on five.

The TPA is inappropriate for anyone who has obligations beyond herself and her students, because of its pretensions to comprehensiveness. I say they are pretensions, because I always come back to the meager compensation of the evaluators. If I received 10 minutes of video and 30 pages of double-spaced text to grade, I would be happy to spend an hour or more on it for $200. For $75, I will unquestionably give it short shrift. I can't emphasize this enough: The TPA cannot be fair or even workable as it is currently structured, because there is not enough balance between the effort the candidate puts into the evaluation and the effort most evaluators will expend at their end.

I feel like a chimpanzee raging in its cage, though, because I know that this is the one thing that won't change about the TPA. It is this way and will remain so because it's a public/private/political partnership. Stanford, which developed the TPA, has the public interest in educational accountability at heart; the politicians who are adopting it want that credibility too, but Pearson wants the profit to be made from charging candidates $300 and paying evaluators less than a third of that. It's a mismatch made in hell.

Watch Me Teach

There is so much about this TPA process that is frustrating, and so little that is edifying. My mentor teacher filmed me teaching my three big lessons - the plans for which I submitted to Pearson weeks ago - this week. Yesterday, during my student teaching seminar at the university, I found out that I can actually change the lesson plans up to the point when I submit the TPA on November 6th. This means that I didn't have to drive myself crazy setting up the whole unit almost a month in advance.

The worst part about all of this up to now has been getting through the buildup to these three lessons on these three particular days, while I'm also trying to learn how to teach - getting to know the kids, figuring out the attendance and grading systems, creating the unit as a whole, etc. Now I find out that all of this was unnecessary. In all likelihood the better way to structure this (even if it wouldn't have been quite as honest) would have been to film lessons I thought were probably going to meet the criteria for getting a high score on the TPA, choose my two 5-minute clips, and then craft the lesson plans in retrospect and write the commentary.

The fact that the "right" way to do this was actually the way that interfered more with my learning to be a teacher - the sense of freedom I had as of Thursday, when the filming was over, is indescribable - points to a limitation in the design of the TPA. The fact that the only way to make it conform more to the real rhythms of teaching and learning to teach would be to fictionalize it, at least to a certain extent, point to a more serious flaw.

But what's interesting, now that I'm looking again at the rubric for choosing my two 5-minute clips out of 150 minutes of classroom video, is that the highest points go to teaching students strategies for comprehending a difficult text, not helping the students to comprehend or dig deeper into the text itself. I suppose this goes along with the New Testament dictum, "Teach a man to fish . . . "

Watching all the video, by the way, is excruciating. I look old and fat. I love getting lost in the moment when I'm in the classroom, focusing totally on the students and the content; and now I'm incredibly self-conscious about what I look like. Yet another unedifying aspect of this process.

Lesson planning and justifyin'

There isn't a single teacher at my top-notch suburban school who hasn't said that planning the lessons I am going to be teaching during the first week of October at this point in the semester is ridiculous. How can I possibly know PRECISELY what I will teach almost a month from now, when I am supposed to be videotaping myself teaching it? But for the TPA, that's what I have to do. I have to turn in 3-5 lesson plans (a "learning segment") and an incredibly jargon-filled, 9-page single-spaced "commentary" that is supposed to relate every participial phrase in the plans to some trendy ed-speak. E.g.:

a.   Explain how your understanding of your students’ prior learning, experiences, and development guided your choice or adaptation of learning tasks and materials to develop students’ abilities to comprehend, construct meaning from, interpret, and/or respond to a complex text.

b.   How are the plans for instruction sequenced in the learning segment to build connections between students’ prior learning and experiences and new knowledge?

c.   Describe common student errors or misunderstandings within your content focus and how you will address them.

d.   Explain how, throughout the learning segment, you will help students make connections between textual references, constructions of meaning, interpretations, and responses to text to deepen student learning.

e.   Describe any instructional strategies planned to support students with specific learning needs. This will vary based on what you know about your students but may include students with IEPs (individualized education programs), English language learners, or gifted students needing greater support or challenge.

[Begin response here: ]

This is Question Four of six.

The need to prepare this TPA on such a reality-free timeline has unquestionably delayed my entry into teaching my mentor's full schedule. Because I have had to prepare pretty much half of the semester for the class I'll be videotaping - 9th grade Honors English - and have spent almost the whole week writing up the commentary, I haven't even started in on 11th grade College Prep English and won't be able to do so until after next week.

I built the major aspects of the unit, which I'm pretty excited about teaching, last weekend. It will incorporate both To Kill A Mockingbird and 1984 as well as articles, at least one TED talk video, instruction on writing comparison essays and excerpts from Black Boy, all in an investigation of how we find authority figures we can trust and how we can deal with legitimate authority figures who are untrustworthy. I taught the first lesson in the unit today and was very happy with the student responses to it. But up to now I've been doing nothing but answering all the Commentary questions and I still have one more to do before submitting it, along with the lesson plans for Oct. 1-5 and all supplementary materials, by Monday night.

What makes this whole exercise so frustrating is not just the time it takes away from my learning how to teach (as opposed to learning how to be assessed as a teacher). It's the rigidity of it all. As I guided my students in their quickwrite about authority figures today, I realized that I should add the question of how they define an authority figure and whether trust and respect are a necessary part of that authority. So I added the question, and that's what sparked the most intense responses from the students. EVERYONE wanted to tell the class, "Well, I think an authority figure is a little different from that.  ..." If I hadn't been able to add that question because I knew I was being graded on teaching what I had planned to teach, the students might not have wanted to participate as much from the very start and they might not have learned as much about life and themselves from all the reading and writing we'll be doing together. So this could have been one case in which assessing the teacher meant limiting the teaching. Not good.

On the other hand, the TPA student manual provided a good laugh. Here it is, the third week of the semester, I'm supposed to have planned out my lessons for a month from now, and the manual suggests I might want to confer with my "cooperating teacher" (why isn't she being given the dignity of mentorship?) a good two months in advance about the videotaped lessons. Hmmm. That would have put us in July. Thanks for the advice, Pearson.

Context for Learning

This is the first information form I need to fill out and submit to Pearson for evaluation. It has questions that even my mentor teacher couldn't answer, like what percentage of students in the class I'm planning to teach - Honors 9th grade English in a suburban school - gets free or reduced price lunches. But it also includes factors that every teacher should know, like who is on an Individualized Education Plan or who has a "504" (which refers to the section of the law that provides for accommodations to be made for students with physical disabilities or Attention Deficit Disorder), as well as questions about which textbook we are using and whether there are any curricular or other limits on what I can teach.

The form is a little confusing to fill out. At the end of every question, there's something that looks like this:

[Begin your answer here.]

I couldn't figure out whether I should write it in red, or start after the red text. Eventually I decided on the latter; hopefully it's acceptable.

I have to admit that the deadline for this, as well as the deadline for my complete set of lesson plans one week later, has crept up on me. It looks like I'll be writing the lesson plans on my birthday and submitting them on the day my daughter sings in the synagogue choir for Rosh Hashanah.

Assignment for "Assessment" class, NYTimes article review

Review of New York Times article:

“Move to Outsource Teacher Licensing Process Draws Protest” (6 May 2012)

“On Education” blog entry by Michael Winerip

This article describes the refusal of 67 out of 68 preservice teachers at the University of Massachusetts School of Education to submit their Teacher Performance Assessment videos and detailed lesson plans to Pearson, the textbook publishing company administering the Stanford University-designed teacher evaluation program. The education students say that their professors, who, like our own College of Education supervisors, observe them in actual teaching situations, “can do a better job judging their skills than a corporation that has never seen them.”

The article is, to a certain extent, an expression of opinion. In the very first sentence, author Michael Winerip calls the TPA an aspect of the “corporatization of public education in America.” He goes on to characterize the UMass protest against the TPA as “quaint and ridiculous.” However, the article also involves factual reporting. Winerip interviews the protesting preservice teachers and their professors, as well as representatives of the TPA, for his piece.

This is the only NY Times piece to have appeared on TPA, so I do not know what, if anything, has come of the UMass protest. Much of the article is devoted to concerns about the parents’ permission of students who appear in the TPA videos to be videotaped. This issue seems to have been resolved at our university thanks to instructions that we either follow our mentor teachers’ school policy in this regard or use CoE-developed permission slips. But I learned a great deal about the “back story” of the TPA program by reading Winerip’s article.

For instance, I found out that Pearson’s bid to administer the Stanford program was the winner in a field of six because the company was the only one to provide seed money for field testing. It had nothing to do with the quality of Pearson’s teacher education offerings, which in my own experience has been middling at best and occasionally outright dubious. Pearson will charge $300 from future preservice teachers in the “more than two dozen states” that have committed to adopting the TPA, but will pay evaluators only $75 per teaching assessment. One of the protesting students at UMass, interviewed by Winerip, wonders whether this is sufficient compensation.

Personally, I don’t wonder about that at all. I know for a fact that it isn’t.

I am a former journalist who is beginning a new career as an English teacher. I used to be paid $75 per “news brief,” and I remember exactly how much time I put into writing those articles. It was rarely more than 45 minutes, and usually about half an hour. That wouldn’t even begin to cover the amount of material the TPA student participants are being asked to produce (20 minutes of videotape alone, plus pages and pages of lesson plans, reflections, student work and reactions to it). 

And as far as I know, the Pearson evaluators do not even have the accountability measure that I had: multiple layers of editors proofing my work. Because they are being paid per grade, and not being compensated for their time, there is no incentive for these evaluators even to watch the full amount of video submitted by students, much less to pore over the rest of the documentation.

My experience working for The Hollywood Reporter, a trade paper for media industry professionals, also tells me that Pearson will be making about a 200% profit on every TPA test. After paying the evaluator, who is a freelancer and therefore gets neither job security nor benefits of any kind, Pearson’s only costs will likely be maintenance of their website and online support services. These factors cannot cost more than $25 per student, and since there will probably be tens of thousands of “customers” every year it may come to considerably less.

Many of my suspicions about the TPA, which were aroused when I learned during our student teaching orientation that the program would be administered by Pearson, were confirmed by this article. I too believe that public education is in the course of being privatized, or in Winerip’s word, “corporatized.” In fact, I believe that the widespread “denigration of public schoolteachers,” as Winerip puts it at the end of his piece, is part of an overall strategy to turn true public education – schooling in individual neighborhoods that prepares students to be responsible, capable adults who contribute to society and the economy – into the political equivalent of Welfare. 

In many major metropolitan areas, young people from low-income and/or high-crime areas already constitute the vast majority of public school students. By instituting policies that punish “ineffective schools and teachers” without mentioning the fact that one is actually punishing these students and the neighborhoods in which they live – students and neighborhoods that already bear the brunt of burdens like the general availability of guns and severely addictive drugs – the “education reformers” are dismantling America’s public education infrastructure in order to build a system in which private companies like Pearson can take an ever-growing slice of the huge public education pie.

Pearson’s move to invest in the TPA program could be one example of this. In the name of providing a “more objective” assessment process for education majors (one which, incidentally, indicates a lack of respect for education professors’ evaluation abilities as opposed to those of other university-level academics), this private corporation is gobbling up the market for preservice teacher testing in at least half the country. The next step will be to apply the TPA (and I find it significant that it is not called STPA, or Student Teacher Performance Assessment) to all of America’s three million teachers. By making its initial investment in the field-testing phase of the TPA, Pearson may very well have solidified its position as the future Microsoft of teacher evaluation.

Pearson Fearsome?

According to this NY Times article from May 6, the people Pearson is hiring to evaluate my Teacher Performance Assessment video and my 7-page, single-spaced lesson plan are going to be paid about $75  for their efforts. I know EXACTLY how much effort I would put into a $75 assignment, because that's what I got paid writing 200-word articles for The Hollywood Reporter. If it was done in 20 minutes I considered myself lucky; half an hour was about average; and if I spent more than 45 minutes on it I was furious at the world. I'm going to be submitting 20 minutes' worth of video to Pearson, so if the evaluator watches the whole thing I'll be stunned. The first three minutes have to be fabulous, I'd say - and as for the lesson plan, my guess is that it hardly counts for anything at all.

The devil is in the details, as usual. Having outside professionals evaluate teachers and teaching  licensure candidates based on video and lesson plans sounds like a great idea, but if you're going to charge the teachers and candidates $300 for the privilege of being evaluated this way, you've got to pay at least half of that to the evaluator.

Higher One is SO annoying!

Because I was gone for much of the summer, I had to reapply for a Higher One card in order to get my student loan refund since my university says it will no longer mail paper checks. I received the new Higher One card yesterday and just went to the MyOneMoney website to register it. The company claims that you can EITHER have your check directly deposited into a Higher One account (which you're supposed to open for that purpose) OR have the check direct deposited at another institution with a 2-3 day delay. What they don't tell you is that you have to print out and snail mail the request to have the check deposited in your regular checking account.

I have enough checking accounts to keep track of, and I'm almost done with student loans anyway, so I went through the whole procedure. But it's incredibly annoying, totally unnecessary and environmentally unsound. I just paid my regional taxes with an electronic ACH request from my checking account, so I know perfectly well that this is just a way to get new college students (who probably don't even have any stamps at home) to open an account with Higher One.

I plan to complain to the university, and I hope Higher One goes out of business very soon.

Teacher Performance Assessment

Yesterday was the big orientation meeting for my student teaching experience, which starts next week. We were introduced to the latest education flavor-of-the-month, the Teacher Performance Assessment project. This will involve submitting incredibly detailed lesson plans and producing about 15 minutes of video of me teaching the plans, as well as student work, my feedback and reflections on the entire process.

I've been fascinated by the subject of teacher evaluation since my first semester as a post-baccalaureate education major, and I heartily approve of a more comprehensive method than the geeky, tooth-and-claw capitalistic and ultimately unfair "value-added" calculus. My reservations are as follows:

• The pilot program is being run by Pearson, a for-profit textbook company that has made a decidedly inferior impression on me after three semesters of using its education software and textbooks; and
• Inevitably, teachers who are good at making interesting videos will get higher scores.

This second point is probably more relevant, given the current position of education "reform" as a political football. If personnel decisions like raises, hiring and even firing of teachers grow to be dependent on the TPA scores, we may see a cottage industry grow up of dynamic education filmmakers producing videos "guaranteed to get you at least a 3" out of a low score of 5.

This is, of course, not at all the idea. But I'm all for the principle of having a variety of sources for teacher evaluation, so I'm going to focus this semester's blog entries not so much on my student teaching experiences per se as on my preparations for, and experiences with, the TPA.

Big tech day

Today, following "Big Joe's Funeral" around Harlem on Google Earth and introducing my African-American-dominated class to Sammy Davis, Jr. as an 8 year-old, singing and tapping to "You Rascal You," was supposed to be the big fun day in class. Instead I got the feeling that they would rather have been doing a worksheet and listening to their own headphones because of all the side conversations that began as soon as I started the "tour."

Most of them wanted to know if the pictures they were looking at were "real," in the sense of whether the cars we were "passing by" in Street View were actually on Malcolm X Boulevard right at the moment we were seeing them. When I explained that they weren't, a lot of the students seemed to lose interest. Maybe it wasn't as cool as I, and most of the other adults to whom I explained my plans, thought it was. Or maybe these students don't get out of their own neighborhood much and have had the edge of their curiosity a bit dulled because of it. Who knows?

Or maybe they're not happy being challenged. More than once I heard a comment about too much discussion of death and "Can we get back to just reading the story now, PLEASE?"

Well, we will tomorrow, because I definitely want to finish up by the end of class.

Taste of Success

Today I started the first unit I have ever taught on literature in a high school. Somehow I don't remember being either this nervous or this organized when I taught college. Maybe I was too young to worry.

More likely too cocky: I was going to write the Great Jewish-American novel, and teaching was just a day job. Not much different from so many of my current male students who are going to get athletic scholarships to top colleges and play in the NFL and the NBA, I reckon.

Anyway, the "set induction" was a game of arranging the story titles in Walter Dean Myers' terrific collection, 145th Street. Over the weekend I made up oak tag title strips; the students held up the strips and debated over what order the titles should go in, rearranging themselves in a line at the front of the classroom. All they knew about the book was a quick look at the front cover and the fact that it was by Myers.

I knew most of them would place "Big Joe's Funeral" at the end and the "Block Party - 145th Street Style" at the beginning, and that's exactly what happened - but interestingly, each class had its own internal logic about who was going to get hurt doing what or who was going to fall in love with whom and when. Of course, the whole idea was to get them a little invested in the book before they even opened it, and then to surprise them: The funeral is the opening story. It worked pretty much like a charm, although of course there were a couple of groans and complaints ("How are we supposed to do this when we don't even know what the story's about?").

I also managed to get students to read in all three classes, even the one with the lowest enrollment and the lousiest attendance (only 5 kids came today). Almost everyone took notes on the main characters, per my instructions, and just about everyone did the quickwrite exit ticket at the end about a character of their choosing.

Tomorrow will be more fun: I've downloaded Google Earth to my netbook, and we'll follow the route of the funeral through Harlem. I also bought the Armstrong version of "(I'll Be Glad When You're Dead) You Rascal You," and hopefully they'll be able to hear it through the tinny speakers.

Practical lessons learned

Mrs. F., whose next rung on the ladder is to become an Assistant Principal, has been doing a lot of administrative work this week. The result is that I've been doing a lot of teaching, unfortunately without having prepared very many lessons.

In the long run this is a good thing, because I'm assuming I'll need to sub in a few nearby districts, probably for a number of years, before I get a full-time job anywhere. So being able to take over someone else's lesson plan at the drop of a hat is a good skill to cultivate. But of course it doesn't lead to me feeling as if I've done my best work at the end of the day.

I spent Tuesday reading the rest of "Crash Room" and letting the students work on their worksheets. I wasn't very happy with the kinds of questions I was asking - all "lower-level thinking" questions about what has just happened, what the first-person narrator is thinking (when he just pretty much told us), etc. It was only afterward that I realized I should have asked the students if they would ever want to work in a hospital now that they've read this story, and if so why, if not why not. I should have helped them relate more personally to it. But my Methods professor, whom I met with on Tuesday afternoon, told me that I had been "modeling careful reading strategies" for the students so I shouldn't feel too badly about it.


Yesterday Mrs. F was in the classroom all day. She went over a worksheet from last week that was related to her article on bullying while I graded the first worksheet I have ever composed. It was about an article in the local paper discussing a blood drive among local African Americans to help people in the community afflicted with sickle cell disease.

I was pretty happy with my own strategy for creating the worksheet - fewer questions, each question a little more valuable than Mrs. F's usual question in terms of points, and a 15-point "essay" (really, just a paragraph) at the end. For me, it was much easier to grade. But I made the mistake of not putting the point values at the end of each question as Mrs. F always does, and although I did say that the essay was only going to get full points for a "detailed and thoughtful" answer, I didn't say explicitly that I was looking for at least three or four full sentences.

I went over the worksheets with the students today - a day during which Mrs. F stuck her head in a couple of times, but that was it, and the sub from Monday was with me in the room - and at one point had to deal with a girl who had just returned from a 10-day suspension and was clearly out to test my mettle. I knew to keep cool and ask her firmly but politely to stop tapping her plastic ruler against the desk part of her chair, and ignore her if she tried to "hook" me into dealing with her. Either this worked or I got extremely lucky (probably the latter), because within a couple of minutes she had decided to walk out of the classroom and I told her not to come back. She received detention from Mrs. F, and if she doesn't show up for the detention she'll get another 10-day suspension.

At one point the rest of the students figured they would see how I handled myself if they started having loud conversations about rap artists across the wide space in the middle of the room, and I was a little worried that things were going to get out of hand. But when I told them that I would be happy to take their written suggestions about rap artists and rap songs to study in class, that I would work up lesson plans and we could definitely spend time on this if they wanted to - as long as the songs didn't have "cuss words" - that ended the discussion and we got back on task. I think I was happiest of all with that moment.

The Sub

When I got the text on my phone this morning, my heart sank. My mentor teacher would be subbing for the Assistant Principal today, and her classroom would have a sub.

I realized just how traumatized I had been by my last placement. The fight in my classroom had broken out with a sub in the room. I almost wanted to call in sick.

But these kids are a lot better behaved than the ones in the last school - and, as I found out over the weekend, from better financial circumstances. Their families are mostly working-class or lower middle-class, not poverty-stricken and crime-ridden. So I decided to give it a try.

My mentor teacher had picked out a short story called "Crash Room" from a collection titled Working Days. I later looked up the book on Amazon and found that School Library Journal and Booklist both called it "uneven"; I found "Crash Room" pretty boring, but I didn't have a say in the matter so I decided to give it a whirl doing a read-aloud. I'm planning to start a unit on Walter Dean Myers's 145th Street next week, so I wanted to get the students used to a different style of teaching.

The sub was extremely impressed. She couldn't compliment me enough, which of course felt great. I wasn't too happy with the questions I was asking the students - basically, all pretty obvious things like: "So what do we know about the narrator at this point?" Almost none of the questions could spark debate, but that was also in part due to the amateurish quality of the writing. For instance, the fact that the protagonist came from a Latino background was not made clear until halfway through the story, and had almost no bearing on it although it was about hospital workers in Texas. Maybe I should have asked the students if they were enjoying the story or not, and if not why not, but I didn't think it was my place to cast aspersions on my mentor teacher's choice of material in her absence. In any case, it's my own fault for not being able to make lemonade.

But I was gratified that, even if there were a couple of sleepers and a few texters over the three periods, there were no behavior issues that were noticeably worse than what I see when Ms. F is around.

First real week

On Tuesday I led a few really good discussions about bullying as a pre-reading activity for an article Mrs. F gave out Wednesday. She'd distributed the discussion question worksheet on Monday, with twelve questions on it like: "Do you think there is a bullying problem in this school? Who is more at fault, the bullies or the bystanders? Do you think parents should have the right to sue the district if their child continues to be bullied?" Any one of those questions could have led to a full-period (50-minute) discussion, in my opinion, and in the end I didn't even cover all the questions.

Several students in all three classes were unsure of what the word "bystander" meant, which I found ironic since it was exactly the bystander syndrome that had led to my downfall when the fight that had started in my classroom moved to the hallway. I posed a few scenarios for them and really probed their moral fiber. A few time Mrs. F felt compelled to intervene because they were giving answers like, "If someone's just irritating, they're asking for it and that's not bullying." One student claimed that there was no bullying problem at their school because everyone in the school was black. Mrs. F nearly blew her stack at that one.

Then on Wednesday the article was handed out, along with a double-sided worksheet with quiz-like questions as well as inference questions and vocabulary words. In the silence, I created a worksheet for the next article, which was about the dearth of African-American blood donors for treating sickle-cell patients. I had wanted to do five questions that involved synthesis of various points in the whole article, as opposed to a paragraph-by-paragraph quiz, but Mrs. F convinced me that the students would object to having such "hard" questions so I broke them up into shorter, more individual ones.

Today my daughter was home sick so I spent most of the day working on my unit for Walter Dean Myers's 145th Street. Just as I discovered in my senior year at the High School for Performing Arts acting department that I prefer researching my character to actually rehearsing plays, I'm finding that I love designing units and thinking up activities for my students without having any idea to what extent I'm going to enjoy teaching them. What started out as just a general idea - "Hey, you're a New Yorker, why don't you do a PowerPoint on Harlem?" - has become pre-reading activities for both the book and the first story, a forest of pink and yellow sticky notes on the text of the first story, and the development of three possible final assessment projects to be completed in May. Love it!

First lesson

Well, it wasn't really a lesson, in the sense that I hadn't planned it. I went over a vocabulary worksheet that Mrs. F had assigned to the students last Friday after having graded them and entered the grades into her computer. The worksheet was obviously at least a decade old and possibly older; one of the sample sentences was about how "word processors" had made typewriters "almost obsolete." I took a poll of all three classes, and no one had ever heard of a word processor (although pretty much all of them knew what "obsolete" meant - that was the vocab word). It also talked about Elizabeth Taylor's violet eyes "elicit[ing] admiration and wonder"; the only students who recognized her name associated it with Michael Jackson, not with any particular eye color.

During the first class, which came right before lunch, Mrs. F had to interrupt me a couple of times because I wasn't reacting to conversations happening on the side. I guess I'm still nervous enough in front of a class to just habitually focus on the task at hand as opposed to what I should be doing, which is paying more attention to the nuances of student response - and nipping any potential distraction in the bud.

There's one 19 year-old senior who has a reputation with all the teachers as a troublemaker. He apparently gets away with all kinds of misbehavior, even severe misbehavior like starting a food fight in the cafeteria, because he's on the basketball team. Mrs. F had an interaction with him that ended in referral this afternoon. I met him last Friday and it was clear within moments that he was an attention-getter and limits-tester, but today his anger was so severe when all she did was walk in his general direction to see whose music was on during class time, it wasn't clear to me whether he was fully in control of himself or just launching a preemptive strike because it really was his music. I'm sure there will be more to report on him as the semester goes on.

Being a Guest

My mentor teacher was out today, so by prior arrangement I visited three different classrooms: A Social Studies class in Government and two English classes. Once again I was impressed by the much more respectful behavior of the students compared with my old placement. Is it just the administration that makes such a difference?

The most instructive was the last class I visited, which was probably for juniors since the teacher is beginning to prepare them for their state standardized graduation test. It was the most word-rich environment I've yet encountered in any of the classrooms, with the walls full of posters, definitions, student work and so on, and the 50-minute period was divided up into various activities: A journal entry, sharing, going over the homework assignment, and then reading aloud from the play THE MIRACLE WORKER and discussion.

When the students shared their journals, the teacher was very specific in her praise ("That was very detailed; I hadn't known anything about that comic book hero and now I feel as if I'm familiar with him") and completely left out criticism, I think deliberately. Unlike my old mentor, she did not give points for sharing and told them exactly how much time they would have to answer her journal question ("If you could be any super hero, who would it be and why?").

And in THE MIRACLE WORKER, she took a behavior modification tack in her interpretation that was extremely effective. The kids really picked up on it. Describing the "fight scene" over dinner when Annie Sullivan first tries to get Helen Keller to eat with a spoon, one girl said: "I think Helen knew exactly what she was doing - she was just testing things out to control Annie. But her plan went wrong."

Now, I wonder how many of the students applied that lesson to themselves . . . ?

In-Service on IEPs and Classroom Management

My first full day at the new placement was spent attending a district-wide "in-service" day - basically, a mandatory conference - on Individual Education Programs, which is what students with disabilities are supposed to have during their school years, and the district's new behavior management strategy.

Having just completed a 14-week intensive course on teaching students with disabilities last semester, including reading the equivalent of two textbooks and taking an essay test every week with between five and eight questions, there wasn't much new material for me during the a.m. session. But the after-lunch behavior management program had a lot of good pointers, including the maxim that behavior management is not apart from teaching, but a part of teaching.

The most important pointer was given to me by the Social Studies teacher I was sitting next to, Mr. Y. He wrote me a note and pulled it out of his notebook:

"Show the kids you care. The rest will fall into place."

I hope he's right, because I do care . . . but things didn't exactly fall into place last semester, when the entire class pushed me out into the hallway in order to have an unobstructed view of a fight that had started in the classroom when I was with a substitute teacher instead of my mentor. Of course I was just an intern, only there a few times a week . . . but still . . .

This school doesn't have that kind of atmosphere - after all, even in my limited time at the other school I witnessed four fights besides "mine" - but I still want to talk to my mentor about it.

New semester, new placement

In the end, things didn't turn out as badly as I had feared at the end of my first field experience - although of course the creative writing unit I taught was nowhere near as groundbreaking for the students as I had initially hoped.

More than half the class submitted drafts of their writing, and one third of the entire class had done at least two drafts. There were six scores of 100; scores were based on the number of drafts (three including the final copy), the length of the story (most were more than the required 450 words), the relatively low number of syntactical and spelling errors and the neatness of presentation. Four other students received 90s, mostly because of the errors in the final draft.

Only one student completed a story of more than 700 words AND handed in her parental permission slip to submit the story to the online writing contest. I submitted her story over Winter Recess (the only change I made, after asking her first, was to break up the story into paragraphs), but she didn't win the contest and I think she never even checked to see if I had submitted her work. Still, I think she felt much more confident about her writing ability at the end of the unit, because when I had her read the whole story aloud the entire class broke out in cheers at the end. I'm pretty sure I achieved my main goal with several students, which was to give them the experience of rewriting what they have already written, constructively critiquing the work of others, and to make them feel more positively about writing in general.

Now I'm doing what's called the Practicum. It's four hours with my mentor teacher four times a week instead of three hours three times a week, which was what I had last semester. My new placement school is in what's considered an "urban" district by my teacher training program, "urban" being a euphemism for what was called "inner-city" when I was growing up, which in turn was a euphemism for "the ghetto" when my parents were growing up. But there is no comparison with last semester's placement.

The building is newer, sunnier and more relaxed. There is no X-ray machine at the entrance, no cops standing around or cop cars out front. There is no hallway lockout. The students come into my mentor teacher's classroom, sit down and quietly wait for her to hand out worksheets. There is almost no conversation until close to the end of the period, when most of the kids are done with their worksheets. The relationship among the staff is collegial and professional, and the administration seems to genuinely care about how things are going.

My mentor for this semester, Ms. F, is a second-career teacher. She spent most of her professional life in Human Resources, and has been teaching high school English for six years. She is a trim, fit, stylish woman who seems to enjoy her students. Ms. F recently received her administration certification, so she is occasionally called to substitute for one of the assistant principals.

Unlike my former mentor, she immediately expressed interest in my blog and said she would subscribe to it. So now maybe I'll have three or four regular readers, including this semester's supervisor!