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.
Dienstag, 7. Februar 2012
Montag, 6. Februar 2012
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.
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.
Donnerstag, 2. Februar 2012
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.
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.
Montag, 30. Januar 2012
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.
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.
Donnerstag, 26. Januar 2012
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!
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!
Donnerstag, 19. Januar 2012
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.
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.
Mittwoch, 18. Januar 2012
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 . . . ?
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 . . . ?
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