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!