Why do I want to teach?

I have realized recently that student teaching has been getting me rather cynical. I don't like that change that has been happening. After grading all those essays, and seeing how poorly my students had done, I started to lose hope that I could help them learn. This past week has been hard because, without the hope that I can help these students learn the material, I haven't seen the point. It's been a whole lot of hard work, and it was just to get things done.

I don't want to become the teacher who does things just because they need to be done. There is too much hard work for me to put up with without my real passion coming into play. So I asked myself, why do I want to teach?

Today, during intervention, I was able to work with some students and help them make some real progress on their projects. It was very rewarding to see them learn, no, to be able to help them learn. Why do I want to teach? Because I want to take part in helping students learn. I love that feeling of connection that comes when a student reaches a new understanding, when they finally get how to complete an assignment, or a new concept enlightens their mind.

That's why I teach. For the personal connection that comes from helping and learning.

Lately, I haven't been getting much of that. Partially because I shut myself off to it - I stopped believing in these students (they did so poorly on the essay), and I began to stop believing in myself. I stopped believing that I was capable of this.

But, that is simply not true.

I need to be the kind of teacher that believes that he truly can help his students, or all the work of teaching is too much for me. I can do a lot of hard work if I feel that I am making a difference. When I don't feel that, it's nose-to-the-grindstone, purposeless, grueling, pointless work. I can't live that way. I cannot teach that way.

I need to find ways to remind myself that these students can learn, and that I can help them. I need to hope in their potential and in mine. Without that, I simply cannot teach.

With that in mind, planning and teaching becomes easier and more effective as well. All I ask myself is: what do I want them to learn? and how can I assess that they are learning that? Anything else can and must go.

I will teach to help students truly learn, and I need to focus on that, and cut away anything that doesn't help with that. If I don't get that personal connection, it's not worth it for me, and it's not worth it for my students.

Parent-Teacher Conference!

I actually really liked parent-teacher Conference.

It was really good to meet with some of the parents of the students that I teach. The most notable things that I learned was my deeper understanding of where these kids are coming from. As I met with these parents I was able to tell what kind of environment these kids were raised in.

Some parents came in and were very concerned with their kid's A-. "We don't like those in our house."

Others saw a B-, gave an understanding smile, and asked how their kid was behaving in class. They understood their kids and were happy that they weren't failing.

Others still were distraught that the grades had dipped so low recently. Their two biggest assignments (worth about 60% of their grade so far) were recently entered, and many students did not do so well.

It was all very insightful. It wasn't very busy at all, one of the slowest in years according to my mentor teacher, so it wasn't stressful. Chatting with my teacher, planning, and reading in between was nice. The only problem was how LONG it was. I had a 12 hour work day and it was exhausting.

Overall, it was a great experience, and I look forward to my future parent-teacher conferences.

Grades

I'm started to get genuinely concerned about the state of my students' grades. Many of them have incompletes in the class, and are not working to make up their work. I want to start working more closely with them during remediation time.

Also, I'm grading the summative assessment for argument writing right now and the average score (so far) is a lot lower than I expected/hoped. My plan right now (at my mentor teacher's suggestion) is to finish grading them all, and then I can look at them and decide if and how I may want to adjust the scoring. This certainly is informing my teaching, and I wonder how much of their scores reflects my teaching and how much reflects my students' efforts/ability.

Grading takes FOR-EV-ER, by the way. I don't know when I'm ever going to plan for the upcoming unit if this grading keeps lasting forever.

Checks and Balances

Dalen had an interesting idea pertaining to educational reform. We were talking about how assessment is needed in order to inform our teaching practices.

We believe that the teachers, being closest to the students and more directly understanding what they need and how they have been taught, should have the power to write the assessments. They act as the legislative branch of education. They should write the material that students will be assessed on.

The district is the executive branch. They need to ensure that these tests are administered and that the data (whether quantitative or qualitative - the teachers should decide this) is used to inform teaching practices. Teachers need to be held accountable for their instruction, so if the students do not test well in an are, teachers should be required to reflect on why this may be (in some cases because of the students, and in some cases because of instruction). The teacher then should be required to try to improve their teaching in those areas where their instruction needs help, whether through a class, collaborating with a colleague whose students did well on that concept, research, or other means.

I'm not sure where the judicial branch fits into all of this.

Autonomy vs. Correlated Curriculum

Elaborated notes from Collaboration today:

The CCSS ensure that important concepts get taught.

How important is it for teachers to teach the same thing at the same time?

What would be the consequence of not having a correlated curriculum?
- A student may miss out on a concept if they change classes at the change of the semester.
- Collaboration of ideas (this is how I teach this concept, how about you?) would not happen AS instruction of that idea takes place for both parties.
- Anything else?

It is important to remember that "nobody knows how long it takes anybody to learn anything." The instruction of pacing should depend on the students.

Solve the first problem by making sure that the same things are taught each term (when students can change their classes). Teachers should each cover the same concepts during each respective term, and term 4 should be left unplanned for any concepts that there wasn't time to cover as well as testing (a large part of fourth term).

Teachers should have the autonomy to choose when in the term to teach the concepts, and how they should be taught. Teachers are professionals who know their craft and who know their students. They are in the best place to make decisions about the educational needs of their students.

As for collaboration, it does not have to take place while both teachers are on the same subject. If two teachers decide to teach something at the same time, that is their privilege to work together in their planning, assessment, and informing each other's practice. But every teacher has the right to teach something in whatever way they feel is best for their students and at the pacing they feel is best. The collaboration of ideas for planning and assessment to inform one's teaching by hearing the ideas of another teacher from the same grade level do not need to take place AS these teachers teach their units together.

Collaboration should mean sharing ideas and using those ideas to inform our own teaching practices. It should not mean teaching the same thing at the same time.

These are my views and ideas on the matter from my experience observing collaboration at my school and listening in on the discussion concerning what collaboration time should be used for. I'm still developing these ideas.

Productive Space

I saw another English teacher's room today. I don't remember her name. All the decorations in her classroom weren't decorations, they served a purpose. One wall had the organizers for argumentative and informational writing. There was a reading corner where you could keep track of books read. Everything had its place. Mostly, I just liked the utility. I think I will strive for this in decorating my own classroom in the future.

Things Fall Apart

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the classroom.

Okay, I'm being a little dramatic. Yesterday was rather annoying though.

To start it off, I spent 6 hours grading on Saturday, and by the time that was through I had decided that I couldn't take any more that day and would get up early on Monday to write my lesson plan. By consequence, 5:00 am found me half awake, a growing sense of dread within me, with several half-baked ideas bouncing uselessly around my brain like the day old heaps of oatmeal that slide of your fork at scout camp. The oatmeal, the ideas, the sense of humanity at such an ungodly hour - things were falling apart.

I took stock of the situation and took hold of an idea, forcing it to shape itself into an edible lesson plan. Workable. A workable lesson plan (can you tell that I'm hungry right now?).

First period arrived and my students looked as if they had gotten less sleep than I had, a feat to be reckoned with. As the lesson wore on, I recognized that they were in a more particularly drowsy state than usual. Perhaps they had spent the night either reveling victory or mourning the defeat of their beloved football team (who won again? I fell asleep fourth quarter). I couldn't believe how inactive they were and how useless my lesson plan seemed.

When the morning dew cleared up and my students had wiped it out of their eyes by fourth period (my next lesson), things started looking up. The lesson plan came together and the students were engaged and learning. I love fourth period. It comes as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed; it blesses him that teaches and those who learn. Ahh, fourth period.

Fifth, lunch, sixth: about the same as usual. Fun but chatty, lots of complaining, and extra chatty and distracted. In that order.

Seventh period was something else. The students are usually edgy, distracted, anxious to leave, but today they were the most lazy bunch of chatty chimps I have ever met. In the half an hour of drafting time that I gave them to begin a rough draft ("Just get all of your ideas down, where ever you are. You need to be ready to show your argument to someone else in another 15 minutes") some of the students only got a few lines written.

A half an hour, continual reminders and offers to help, and 3 lines of text.

I don't understand it.

There will be very little mercy dropping from Mr. Jones's desk when he is grading some of these papers, I can say that.

Dealing with Parents

Last week I received my first email from an angry parent. The student hadn't done as well as he had hoped on his assignment, and the father decided that he had a bone to pick with my grading practices and my choice of topic.

The email was very cordial, and the father explained how he understood the value in the assignment, but, knowing that I was a student teacher, doubted as to whether or not I had been fair in my grading. That part was okay. I was able to explain myself well and quote the common core.

What I didn't understand was how the parent did not like that he child was going to be doing research on racial equality in America, thinking it too controversial a topic for a 9th grade classroom. I explained that I believe that giving challenging topics to middle schoolers shows them respect. It also gives them an opportunity to think through these difficult issues instead of being blindsided by them later in life. Of course, I conceded his right as a parent to choose an alternate topic for the assignment.

Fortunately, I had Mr. Anson's backing and approval with my teaching and grading practices, which helped me know that I was not in the wrong, but it was still challenging to determine how to respond to this parent. I took a moment to think through his email and made an effort to carefully choose my response instead of reacting to the email.

I didn't hear back from the parent, but the student did start doing research on tap vs. bottled water, a much more benign topic to be sure. He'll still get a lot out of the research and writing aspect of the assignment, so I am content.