Perplexed, Bewildered, Bemused, Mystified, Stumped, Flummoxed, Puzzled

Can't figure it out.

We post students' grades online

Most parents don't check.

(It's true--on our grading program there's a little scroll-down window that shows us how many times a parent or a kiddo has checked grades. A parent can even sign up for free notifications. If I had a kid I'd be so glad to know what was up, because, according to most of the parents I conference with, teens are, ahem, less than communicative with them, something that hasn't changed since I was a tyke. If I were a kid, I'd be checking all the time.)

No Lumpia for Me

MONDAY: I pass out the announcement for our next salon, our culminating event after analyzing Lord of the Flies, and I can't believe my ears: actual groans and grumbles.

Really? You guys don't want a luau? (do not let them see you wilt. do not take this personally. do not think about all the lumpia you won't be eating do not do not do not)

Not really, they say.

Does this mean you didn't like the first one?

NO!! they explode sincerely. We loved it!  But this one seems like too much work, and we have so much going on in our other classes.

OK, no salon, but you will each need to do your own music assignment independently.

Again there are some groans, but I don't care--I want to try this activity: each student has to choose a song that she thinks fits the text and then document it to death. I show them my example with citations from our text:
                                       
The Who: Baba O'Riley written by Pete Townshend

Out here in the fields                     (The whole text is on an island—“out here”)
I fight for my meals                       (Jack hunts for meat: 68)
I get my back into my living         (Ralph and Simon build huts: 50)
I don't need to fight                       (Piggy is always right, but can’t
To prove I'm right                                   fight back when antagonized or questioned: 71)
I don't need to be forgiven            (Jack apologizes once—never about Simon or Piggy: 72)
Don't cry                                       (Ralph cries for the death of Piggy only in the end: 202)
Don't raise your eye                     (Roger is furtive, doesn’t make eye contact: 22)
It's only teenage wasteland          (No adults on the island except a dead one: 95, 96)

THURSDAY: We share the songs--"Demons" by Imagine Dragons was selected by four students, two have written about "The Eye of the Tiger," and the class clown has chosen "Don't Stop Believin'." I ask them if this was easy or difficult, and it turns out it was challenging on a surprising number of levels. I will definitely try this again next year. Kids learn documentation, learn how to support their thinking, and as S. put it, "To put on paper our ideas and connections in a way that would make sense to the reader."

Of course they want to me play the songs. I tell them that was supposed to be part of the salon they didn't want.  And then I play some of them anyway. I am their hero for this melodious minute.

Teaching vs NASA Engineering

I don't usually post full articles that others have written, but this one validated some of the struggles I have personally, daily struggles that John Q. Public is ignorant about.

Teaching isn't Rocket Science. It's Harder
by Ryan Fuller

In 2007, when I was 22, I took a position as an aerospace engineer working on the design of NASA’s next-generation spacecraft. It was my dream job. I had just received a degree in mechanical engineering, and the only career ambition I could articulate was to work on something space-related. On my first days of work, I was awestruck by the drawings of Apollo-like spacecraft structures, by the conversations about how the heat shield would deflect when the craft landed in water and how much g-force astronauts could withstand. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t just watching a documentary on the space industry—I was inside it.

I was extremely motivated during my first year of work. I got in earlier and stayed later than most, and I tried to learn everything I could from my more experienced colleagues. The work wasn’t easy. Our team was trying to re-engineer, with modern technology, something that was designed in the ’60s. As a design engineer, I had to integrate the efforts of several different groups that often didn’t talk to each other or even get along very well. My deadlines haunted me like a thousand nightmares. Over the course of the next few years, though, I received awards and exceptional performance reviews, and I gained the respect of my colleagues, some of whom had been in the business for about as long as I had been alive.

Because I’ve worked as an aerospace engineer and later as a teacher through Teach for America—this is my second year of teaching 11^th grade math and robotics at Sierra High School in Colorado Springs—I find the public perception of both careers to be fascinating. When I tell people that I worked on the design of a NASA spacecraft, their mouths drop and their eyes pop, and their minds are no doubt filled with images of men in white lab coats running between rocket engines and blackboards filled with equations of untold complexity. Most people will give aerospace engineers tremendous respect, without having any idea what they actually do.

In teaching, a person can be extremely competent, work relentlessly, and still fail miserably—especially in the first year or two on the job.

But no one can fully understand how difficult teaching in America’s highest-need communities is until he or she personally experiences it. When I solved engineering problems, I had to use my brain. When I solve teaching problems, I use my entire being—everything I have. A typical engineering task involves sending an email to a colleague about a potential design solution. A typical teacher task involves explaining for the fourth time how to get the variable out of the exponent while two students put their heads down, three students start texting, two girls in the back start talking, and one student provokes another from across the classroom.

As a teacher, I must prioritize the problems of getting the distracted students refocused and stabilizing the cross-classroom conflict before it escalates into a shouting match or worse, all the while making sure the learning of the other 25 students in the room doesn’t come to a complete halt. I also must address these problems in a consistent, respectful way that best serves the needs of the students, because if I don’t, the problems will increase in number and become more difficult to solve.

As an engineer, I dealt with very complex design problems, but before I decided how to solve them, I had a chance to think, research, and reflect for hours, days, or even weeks. I also had many opportunities to consult colleagues for advice before making any decisions. As a teacher, I have seconds to decide how to solve several problems at once, for hours at a time, without any real break, and with no other adults in the room to support them. There are days of teaching that make a day in the office seem like a vacation.

One of the biggest misconceptions about teaching is that it is a single job. Teaching is actually two jobs. The first job is the one that teachers are familiar with; people who have not taught can pretend it doesn’t exist. The tasks involved in this first job include lesson planning, grading, calling parents, writing emails, filling out paperwork, going to meetings, attending training, tutoring, and occasionally sponsoring a club or coaching a sport. The time allotted to teachers for this work is usually one hour per workday. But these tasks alone could easily fill a traditional 40-hour work week.

clapping chalkboard erasers takes up all my time these days

The second job is the teaching part of teaching, which would more aptly be called the performance. Every day, a teacher takes the stage to conduct a symphony of human development. A teacher must simultaneously explain the content correctly, make the material interesting, ensure that students are staying on task and understanding the material, and be ready to deal with the curve balls that will be thrown at her every 15 seconds—without flinching—for five hours. If, for some reason, she is not able to inspire, educate, and relate to 30 students at once, she has to be ready to get them back on track, because no matter what students say or do to detract from the lesson, they want structure, they want to learn, and they want to be prepared for life.

I experience more failure every five minutes of teaching than I experienced in an entire week as an engineer. Giving a presentation to NASA about how the thermal protection system of a spacecraft is connected to its primary structure is a cakewalk compared to getting 30 teenagers excited about logarithms. A difficult moment in engineering involves a customer in a big meeting pointing out a design problem that I hadn’t considered. The customer’s concerns can be eased with a carefully crafted statement along the lines of, “You’re right. We’ll look into it.” A difficult moment in teaching involves a student—one who has a history of being bullied and having suicidal thoughts—telling me that she is pregnant 30 seconds before class starts. What carefully crafted statement will help her?

Moments of success seem to come less often as a teacher, but when they do arrive, they can make up for all the failures: the excitement on a student’s face when she understands a concept after lots of struggle; the feeling of exhilaration when all the energy in the room is directed toward the day’s lesson; the shared laughter between teacher and student at a joke that only they understand. Sometimes successes doesn’t strike until later, as when I found out that a two-minute presentation I gave on petroleum engineering changed the career path of one of my students. In each second of her chaotic day, a teacher has a chance to transform the lives of young people for the better. How many aerospace engineers can say that?

In teaching, a person can be extremely competent, work relentlessly, and still fail miserably. Especially in the first year or two on the job, success can seem impossible. For people who have been so successful up to that point in their lives—failure is a difficult thing to face, especially when that failure involves young people not being able to realize their full potential in life.

Because of all this, sometimes teachers in high-need communities think about leaving for other professions. As someone who quit his job designing a NASA spacecraft during a severe recession without any clear plan, I understand the power of doing what feels right to you—you have that choice, that privilege. Just don’t forget about the ones who don’t have much in the way of choices and privileges. Don’t forget about the ones that don’t get to choose what school they go to. Who don’t get to choose who their teachers are. Who don’t get to choose how the students around them act. Who don’t get to choose what kind of environment they were born into. Don’t forget about them. They’ll be there Monday morning.
A version of this post originally appeared on TeacherPop, the blog of Teach for America corps members.

Ryan forgot to mention the lack of time for reflection and bodily functions. Don't laugh--if I had twenty minutes immediately after each class to reflect on what went right, to record successes and failures in my delivery, to straighten up, to get that email to a parent ASAP while the student behavior is fresh in mind, to ready the room, to gather my thoughts for a bit, or to sit in silence after a raucous class activity, of course I'd be a more effective teacher.  And one can only dream of using the facilities when one needs to....

CLICK HERE FOR THE POST I GRABBED IT FROM

Fats Waller Was Right: "One Never Knows, Do One?"

One girl's smile as I
opened the huge, heavy box,

Overpowering scents...and love

filled with teenaged joy:

Shimmer body mists,
candy, two lotion bottles
And.....a stuffed turtle!!!

This bounty she gave
despite her low grade, despite
her classroom silence

And so the truth, proved
once more, that teachers can't know,
can't guess, whom they touch

G. handed me the giant box, heavy, shifting, right before lunch (all kinds of sweet things have happened this year with period four, right before lunch). I hugged her and told her I'd open it on Christmas morning. "No, open it right now," she urged, eyes shining.

Uh oh, I'd better put on my "appreciative teacher face" because sometimes kids give the darndest things, even things I can't identify, and I have to step diplomatically and enthusiastically through emotional land-mines.

But this time, I was blown away. Every one of the items was something G. would love to keep for herself, but she gave to me out of love. I know her family doesn't have a ton of money, but whatever they gave her for shopping, she had poured so much on to me that I got a little dizzy and my eyes leaked. I looked up at her and her face was beaming, gratified that she had overwhelmed me. Big hugs, and off she went.

And so I know now that G., despite the tug of war grade between a D and an F, despite her stream of Fs on tests, despite me routinely asking her to re-do assignments because they don't make sense, despite her lack of voluntary participation in class--loves period four as much as I do. 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

That moment when the high school usurps your curriculum...AGAIN

Last post was about my thrilledness (Humpty Dumpty and Shakespeare give us all permission to invent words) over my highly gifted kids getting into Lord of the Flies. I was exuberant.

(I never blogged about why this unit was a big deal. See, I'd been teaching Animal Farm and To Kill a Mockingbird to my 8th graders for four years when the high school VP emailed my principal and told him those books were now (thanks, Common Core) going to be taught in 9th grade. It was more than lame--for one, I was getting ready to launch AF in a week or so, and two, TKAM is just my favorite. For three, teaching TKAM was so awesome after teaching Elie Wiesel's Night--to teach about a man of courage just brought me joy and was a wonderful counterpoint to Night's darkness. OK, I reconciled myself to writing units for two new texts this year. I asked the VP what the upper grades were teaching and only heard from one 9th grade teacher.

Fine. I spent days creating a unit for Lord of the Flies, and boy did I get excited. Talked to a teacher friend in Texas. Stole a few ideas from a teacher in Pennsylvania. Got some ideas straight from the Creator. Man, this was gonna be waaaay better than AF, waaaaay deeper. You can see read about my excitement here and here.)

Things just kept getting better, especially when I assigned chapter 8 for reading and the kids came in all shaking their heads about the answer to the question, "Who IS 'Lord of the Flies?'" Whoo!!!

After school that day I had a couple of formers come by to visit, sophomores in Honors English at the local high school. "Guess what we're reading, Miss M?" Oh dear Lord, please, no....

I dashed off an email to my principal and the high school VP, forwarding an old email where I'd asked for what the upper grades taught. I told them I'd heard no reply. I told them SOME of what my unit contained--Hobbes, Rousseau, leadership theory, Christ figure symbology, Freud--and got the response: "My best advice is to check with the department head before you select novels."

Are. You. Serious....

If my kids could do this in 8th grade, shouldn't the 10th grade teacher tackle something tougher? Give them Plato. Or just TELL ME WHAT THE UPPER GRADES ARE DOING, AS I'D ASKED. Or ask US what WE'VE done at the lower grades!

Anyway, my principal wrote a response supporting me: "Please understand that we need to keep Lord of the Flies here at DP." I haven't heard anything back from the high school or from him. I am hoping no new news is good news, but it's been a loonnnnng time since I have been that deflated. Gonna press on this year with my plans--comparing Peter Brueghel's paintings to the novels, finding music that goes with each character (compiling the definitive LOTF soundtrack with rationales), writing fine literary analysis papers, and celebrating all of it with a luau complete with PORK (bahaha) and the "islands" creating displays of the symbols and characters chosen from the text: fire, specs, the conch, the beast, pigs, Ralph, Simon, Jack, Piggy......and when they get to high school and the high school forces them to do the same things I had them do already, it will be upon THEM to write a new unit. These kids are ready for more.

And I think I am done giving up the books that work so well with my history course. 

That Moment When the Class Finally.....

I was beginning to think it would never happen, that inner click you feel as an educator when your class corporately buys into the book you are reading. But it happened today, and what a relief.

DAY ONE: Name choosing and nametag making was fine, fun, childish, unacademic, and silly--but good team-building. 

DAY TWO: It did NOT go well. We began with a Golding bio--fine as it went, and then started the book from the Pulitzer Prize winner. But the yards of description Golding pours into the island bogged us down (my exact 10th grade reaction: "Who CARES about all this stuff?? Tell the story, already!").  Boring. Yawn. I brought out the conch--mild interest--passed it around--mild interest. Sigh. I assigned the rest of chapter one for homework. I felt defeated.

DAY THREE: I passed out leadership style readings. This was a bit more interesting. In their islands they had to connect the styles to the boys and write down where in the text their support was. I asked, "Was this activity ok?" B., who LOVES to learn, said sincerely, "This was fun!" But MR. gave me that apologetic head tilted smile that said just as loudly, "Not really." I still felt better because the groups were talking. We launched the next chapter and made lists of the boys, their traits, the symbols, and our designations of meanings. The list-making was full-class but half-hearted. I trusted that list, though. I was thrilled when the kids posted Ralph as democratic and Jack as autocratic. Small victories when things aren't going your way can feel like huge ones.

DAY FOUR: I began chapter three with a handout about characteristics of Christ figures I teacher-stole from a wonderful teacher in Pennsylvania. More interest, especially when we looked at Obi-wan Kenobe, Gandalf, and Dumbledore in that light (they weren't familiar with Cool Hand Luke). "Is Simon going to die?" asked an astute person. "Perhaps, but necessarily--do you think Simon will be crucified or resurrected?" I returned. The normally jolly N. was uncharacteristically scornful: "Number 11 on this list is dumb! No one is a carpenter!" And so we began the chapter only to find the Simon is helping Ralph build a hut. "He IS a carpenter!" someone yelled triumphantly. Things were looking up. They finished chapter 3 over break. The Christ figure trope was a revelation for them, a novelty, cool and adult.

DAY FIVE: We pretty much straight read chapter 4 as a class, adding to our list about the boys. I talked about symbols, and the kids were a bit more into the drama. My VP walked into watch. Wish I had something better than reading aloud. Nope.

DAY SIX: But then today. Ah. Half the students read about Rousseau and the other half about Hobbes. Then we had a Chalk Talk--I had prepared the classroom with ten quotes, half from R, half from H, and the students responded to the quotes and to each others' responses using dry erase markers. It was like having ten silent conversations at once! I had warned them about writing stupid things like "I like turtles," but about three boys couldn't help themselves (Hobbes would say that--and I will use that tomorrow as an example in class). When we began to review chapter four, a shift happened. I don't know what, but the kids began to see the story as a story of human nature. I let them talk. "Would the kids treat Piggy differently if he looked different?" "I think Jack punching Piggy is a sign of civilization running down." (!!) "But what about the cover on this book? Why is that giant fly near Piggy? Is he Lord of the Flies?" And off the discussion ran: who WAS Lord of the Flies?

God bless this ambiguous cover

I finally shared what any bible-reading, church-going Protestant fifty years ago would know, that The Lord of the Flies is Beelzebub, Satan. (I did this by showing Wikipedia's entry and scrolling to the verses in the bible in Matthew 12.) The kids got excited about the reference to the house divided--"The island is dividing!" And then they wondered if the Beast, or maybe Jack, was the Lord of the Flies. Someone wondered if Piggy's name was connected to the pigs on the island. "The names are significant," is all I would say until a girl jokingly asked if Ralph was going to vomit since his name is slang for vomit. "His name means 'counselor,' I said. A thrill ran through the class, I felt it. I decided to share with them the secret of names that had captivated me decades earlier.  Above the lists of the boys, the students watched as the meanings of the names were written:
Ralph - counselor
Jack - supplanter, usurper
Simon - listener
Roger - spear
Piggy

"Piggy's name is significant because it means what it says." And the class blew up--"Piggy is going to die, not Simon!" "Simon is going to save Piggy because he is the Christ figure!" "Jack is evil and must be the Lord of the Flies!" They were all* so excited and absorbed, making connections and predictions--"Roger is Jack's tool to kill Piggy, just like Jack speared the real pig!" "Jack broke Piggy's glasses, does that mean the end of intelligence?" OK, cue the bell.

Tomorrow we will look for Hobbes and Rousseau in the text and have a quiz contest among the islands groups. But I believe that when I assign chapter five as homework the kids will enjoy it. FINALLY.

*"All" is a relative term. Do 36 students ALL do anything at the same time? In a class of 36, many of whom are introverts, it is sometimes difficult to be accurate about "all." I use it here in the teacher sense of "heavy majority with 36 sets of eyes looking alert."

Teaching Is a Scream

He has alopecia...AND five times as much personality as the average person

Sometimes
  my eyes fill a little
  spill a little

Sometimes
   my heart beats a little quicker
   feels a little bigger

Unless you have taught
   and been hopelessly caught
   by the fun and the joys
   of these girls and these boys....

You
really
can't
possibly
understand
that my job
is truly
the best in the land.