"As extensive research shows, just one year with a gifted teacher in middle school makes it far less likely that a student will get pregnant in high school, and much more likely that she will go to college, earn a decent salary, live in a good neighborhood and save for retirement."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The other day my father went the Natural History Museum. After looking up his last name to give him a ticket, the young docent, K., asked, "Do you have a sister named Lola? She was my favorite teacher all through school..." [Ed.: OK, I could either frame this as "My dad looks good for his 77 years," "I look awful for my half century," or "Students have absolutely no idea that 13 years isn't really that long." (Personally, I think my daddy looks fantastic.)] "...yes, she made me love history so that I even got a history degree--lots of my friends did, too." Teachers don't get to revisit students and distill and analyze their positive and negative influence on their students and their lives' outcomes. That "extensive research" can't really show causality. Could I measure my efficacy by counting who got pregnant in high school, who graduated from college, who saves for retirement? Is it my personal fault if a kid drops out? There is NO WAY to find out one's influence without asking the students, is there? And self -reporting is, as they say, less than reliable. How can "They" know what would have happened if a kid had this type of teacher, or that kind? How could they know that maybe K. would have become a ROCKET SCIENTIST or a BRAIN SURGEON if she hadn't gotten derailed by the thrills of 8th grade history class where we sang some cheesy songs, took Cornell notes throughout the year, and reenacted the Battle of Gettysburg in twenty minutes? Maybe I RUINED HER. Maybe K. was going to find the cure for cancer. Maybe she would have been an engineer and be making all kinds of money, rather than handing my extremely youthful-looking dad a ticket in a local non-profit museum. But maybe I saved her life. Maybe she was thinking about finding the cure for cancer, but now she will live a beautiful, fulfilling life helping others connect with the past, present, and future. Maybe she would have been miserable in any other field. I reread that NYT paragraph and find it overwhelming. That much responsibility...that's crazy, people. We place these middle schoolers into cinderblock classrooms (which I find absolutely horrifying--the cinderblock classrooms, not the placing of the kids) and for 55 minutes, five days a week, one middle school teacher can have that great of an impact??? How can anyone be calm about this??? How can we not be more serious, wise and intentional about teacher recruitment, training, and retention??? how? how?HOW??? When I was in middle and high school, taking those career aptitude tests, one of the questions was about how important it was for me to influence people. For me, the answer was super duper important. I really wanted to (and still hope to) make a positive difference in this world--but I didn't think I could actually influence someone's sex life or retirement savings. That's like, dude, more influence than Oprah. I've always felt the responsibility to be a heavy one, an honorable one. But dear Lord, this little paragraph means I want to make sure that YOU love them through me. Help me to be Your arms. Help me to speak Your words. Help me to love them the way You do. Amen.
*from "Can Students have too much TECH, JAN. 30, 2015
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 11th
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.
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....
We are
starting a new year and I need to remember my true calling and my true
Captain. I can't stop reading this sonnet and applying it to the school year, especially the public school year. I haven't been excited AT ALL about this coming year, perhaps because last year was my best ever, but this poem inspires me in a way that nothing has so far, not even the aisles of The Container Store or the techniques in Teach Like a Champion or having a spanking-clean and ready room:
The Call of the Disciples by sonnet master Malcolm Guite
He calls us all to step aboard his ship.
Take the adventure on this morning's wing,
Raise sail with him, launch out into the deep,
Whatever storms or floods are threatening.
If faith gives way to doubt, or love to fear,
Then, as on Galilee, we'll rouse the Lord,
For he is always with us and will hear,
And make our peace with his creative Word,
Who made us, loved us, formed us and has set
All his beloved lovers in an ark;
Borne upwards by his Spirit, we will float
Above the rising waves, the falling dark,
As fellow pilgrims, driven toward that haven,
Where all will be redeemed, fulfilled forgiven.
(In search of more curricular inspiration, I will be watching Stand and Deliver sometime this three-day weekend before the ship sets sail on Tuesday....)
Soooo. A friend of my mom's is a kindergarten teacher, retiring any minute now. L. tells me she ran into a former student of mine, that they discovered this mutual connection somehow, some freakish incidence of Six Degrees from Lola Bacon. Apparently what he told her about me as a teacher is that I am very..... strict. Strict???
Though I've been teaching since thedawn of cell phones, this is the first time I've had THAT feedback. I kinda don't know what to make of it.
It's better to be remembered as strict than as lenient, I suppose, and "strict" is waaaay better than "horrible."
Ratemyteacher.com asks students to rate a teacher's helpfulness, clarity, and easiness. I do really well on the first two and think that is a teacher's goal. Students do not perceive me as an easy teacher. Is that the same thing as saying someone is strict?
What does that word mean, anyway? When I was in elementary school, it kind of was synonymous with "mean." If a teacher was nice but was in charge, we'd say, "She's nice, but she doesn't let kids get away with stuff," because the word "strict" had some bad connotations.
Am I strict? In September, I am super strict, I admit (a little defensively proud of it). There are only four rules for class and I have to make sure 35 or so 8th graders, crammed together in a small wooden bungalow with no a/c, LEARN stuff that they don't, let's face it, care about. When kids learn how to behave in September, that pays big dividends for the rest of the year.
But am I strict? I don't write referrals because my kids behave. The principal (well, the one who just left who was at the school for eight years) sends in student teachers and visitors and staff members to watch me because she thinks I'm a good class manager with good class rapport. Am I strict? Did that former student REALLY mean I was "mean?"
Postscript: This morning I read a blog that is usually way above my head, and I caught whiffs of my post and of other doubts I've had about the meaning of my life, that I've never written a book, about possible self-delusion, and personal struggles as a teacher in a public school setting (a Christian teacher, what's more). This post by Dr. Holly Ordway gave me a handle:http://www.hieropraxis.com/2011/01/i-can-be-a-failure/
Inattention isn't just a problem in the classroom; for those of us who make a living through communication, it's the quintessential obstacle we must overcome. And today we have more competition for attention than ever before. Ever deliver a lesson to someone whose head was bobbing and fingers were drumming, and realize he is listening to a song in his head, and you'd have to repeat everything? Ever try to get someone's attention only to notice that she was wearing earplugs, forcing you to flap your hands about, and then feel as if you are an intrusion?
These past five years as a teacher, I've noticed a shift in the level of imagination that kids bring to the table. They are as exuberant as ever, as intelligent as ever, but when you turn the thinking over to them, many seem truly lost. Are we also losing the ability to listen to ourselves? Isn't that what thinking is?
I have a friend who said she couldn't fall asleep unless the radio was on. Her eight hours were infiltrated by all kinds of lyrics and commercials that seeped into her brain at some level.
I have a friend whose television is always on, loud enough to compete with our conversation, though no one is watching it.
My uncle leaves NPR on in the car, even though he has lively conversations with his passengers.
Mr. Treasure suggests three minutes of daily silence and notes incidentally that nearly every spiritual tradition has contemplation as a component of its practices. Three minutes off the grid with only our thoughts to occupy our minds--could you do it? Could our kids? Would that be "a waste of time" or part of a true education?
When I was in third grade, we had a guest speaker who was a graphologist. I was FASCINATED by the idea that you could discern someone's personality traits from their handwriting.
The guest said since we were just learning cursive, it was too soon to really analyze our own writing. But I do remember a classmate asking that since our writing showed our personalities, could CHANGING our handwriting shift our personalities--because the guest said YES. I tripped out. (Hold that thought.)
Now I have never researched graphology (although I admit to analyzing people's handwriting all the time based on what I learned that day--high cross on your t's mean you think highly of yourself. Open loops above your a's and o's? You can't keep a secret), but this morning I wondered if there was a similar link between SES and TV viewing.
" Insofar as their television viewing are concerned, we observed these preferences:
SES Level A: travel, business & finance, economy, recent Hollywood movies (on premium cable channels or pay-per-view), internationally produced drama series, politics [TOP 10% of SES]
SES Level B: biographies, documentaries, general interest & education, local news, sports [NEXT 20%]
SES Level C: sports commentary, live music concerts, music videos, cooking, home decoration, entertainment, home shopping, internationally produced telenovelas [NEXT 30%]
SES Level D: domestically produced novelas, game shows/contests, comedies, horror, cartoons. [NEXT 40%; see chart below; all brackets Haiku Education's]"
Back to the held thought: can changing one's viewing habits influence one's SES? Hmmm.
AND SO... I want to expose my charges to the beautiful and the true. I want them to feed on integrity and good character. I want them to ask "why?" I want the novels in my class library to help them become noble and jolly. This TV study supports my notion that mainstream TV is an enemy of their financial future; perhaps so are certain types of books. This is not a censorship argument--if a kid is into bodice-rippers, that's her business--but I want to have a shot at helping to WIDEN and perhaps shift that taste to include, perhaps, some Charlotte Bronte or Jane Austen, or Ray Bradbury for that matter.
I guess I am just echoing what Paul wrote in Philippians 4:8:
"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."
It doesn't happen often, really only about once a year, and who knows why. Perhaps it's a convergence of gravitation, weather, hormones, CST testing dread, a strange dream, and the usual sad Padre win-loss record, but comes an odd day when I simply do. not. want. to. go in that classroom and face anyone. That day was yesterday.
Before school, I shared my dread with my close colleagues. "I don't wanna be that whiny teacher," I whined. A. listened with love and her eyes didn't judge me. K. commiserated and made me laugh, even when I shared that part of my low is my persistent belief that education can transform EVERYONE into Lola's ideal of a Fine Human Being with Noble Character Who Loves Reading when the disappointing truth is that the Bell Curve of Life indicates that a large portion of the population will forever gravitate toward daytime reality TV and hangovers. And this crushes me.
Of course I got on with it. The Compromise of 1850 wasn't going to teach itself. As usual, teaching itself became its own reward as I turned away from me to them and the task at hand.
Then it was time for my seminar English class--and two boys, D. and I., had spent their own money to buy Hershey bars for everyone in class! Their final flourish was to hand me a gigantical Hershey's kiss. Of course my heart grew three sizes.
And then it was time for Haiku Friends!! That's right--we are studying poetry, and for fun, students were assigned a fellow student to write about. I collected their little poems, read them aloud, and the students guessed the subjects. It was delightful and yet another time of bonding with this really wonderful class, but as I read the last one, C. rushed up to me waving one last haiku:
"Hamilton's girlfriend
In third grade, Calhoun punched her
Educates many"
I'm a big Alexander Hamilton fan--I'd told them of the day when Doug hit me--C had written a poem about me! For laughs? So I wouldn't feel left out? Because he was enjoying our time together? All good.
And then after school, I found my colleague K. had put a poem in my mailbox:
All my pwoblems who knows, maybe evwybody's pwoblems is due to da fact, due to da awful twuth dat I am SPIDERMAN. I know. I know. All da dumb jokes: No flies on you, ha ha, and da ones about what do I do wit all doze extwa legs in bed. Well, dat's funny yeah. But you twy being SPIDERMAN for a month or two. Go ahead.
You get doze cwazy calls fwom da Gubbener askin you to twap some booglar who's only twying to wip off color T.V. sets. Now, what do I cawre about T.V. sets? But I pull on da suit, da stinkin suit, wit da sucker cups on da fingers, and get my wopes and wittle bundle of equipment and den I go flying like cwazy acwoss da town fwom woof top to woof top.
Till der he is. Some poor dumb color T.V. slob and I fall on him and we westle a widdle until I get him all woped. So big deal.
You tink when you SPIDERMAN der's sometin big going to happen to you. Well, I tell you what. It don't happen dat way. Nuttin happens. Gubbener calls, I go. Bwing him to powice, Gubbener calls again, like dat over and over.
I tink I twy sometin diffunt. I tink I twy sometin excitin like wacing cawrs. Sometin to make my heart beat at a difwent wate. But den you just can't quit being sometin like SPIDERMAN. You SPIDERMAN for life. Fowever. I can't even buin my suit. It won't buin. It's fwame wesistent. So maybe dat's youwr pwoblem too, who knows. Maybe dat's da whole pwoblem wif evwytin. Nobody can buin der suits, dey all fwame wesistent. Who knows?
.... I realized that K. understood, that James Hall understood: My suit won't come off and sometimes that's my pwoblem. I am SPIDERMAN FOR LIFE, and sometimes trying to save the world--or even just one thirteen year old--gets a little discouraging or even tiresome. But I am here to testify that the generous big hearts of boys and the power of compassion and poetry are transformative. The odd day is over, and I know that I am doing what I am supposed to be doing, and that changes everything.
...is Amanda Mayeaux--read her bio HERE. I met her at the Disney Teacher Awards where she and her team swept the top awards, and I've been learning from her ever since.
Click HERE for a post from her blog that sums up my thoughts when I talk to people who don't have any teachers in their family or hang out with teacher friends--if you are a teacher, get ready to feel understood, and if you don't have any close teacher friends, she will help you know what to say when you talk with them.
(And if I say "them" as if teachers are another species, it's because the best ones kind of are.)
So today in the middle of O. Henry's "A Retrieved Reformation," right when we get to the part where Jimmy gets engaged, the kids start to talk to the story like some people talk to characters in a horror movie: "Oh no!" "She's a banker's daughter and he is a thief but she doesn't know it!" "Don't do it!" It is perfect because I am teaching them about different types of irony. Clearly they are grasping dramatic irony--when the readers know something the characters don't.
...and then they collectively gasp when little Agatha gets locked in the safe and Jimmy's fiancee asks if he can help--situational drama. (One girl makes fists and shakes her arms back and forth the same way hungry newborns do.) And after the last line is read, about five kids applaud, ten exhale audibly, and all 32 have smiles wreathing their faces.
And then they got EXCITED about their assignment: draw cartoons depicting the three types of ironies, either alone or in pairs. Oh, the buzz! They couldn't wait to get started, they couldn't wait to differentiate between the types of ironies, and they couldn't wait to show me some of their ideas: A love-struck girl is unaware of the big knife in her lover's hand; a plastic surgery seeker becomes the guest speaker at the national "Love Yourself the Way You Are" convention; a homeless man checks his homepage on Facebook, only to get an "Error 404" sign; a man calls an exterminator, unaware that the exterminator is himself a giant cockroach...
(One of my favorite moments was revealing the irony of the character's name--"Jimmy" means to pry something open--juxtapose that with "Valentine"???)
As for Alanis, CLICK HERE FOR A LINK to a post that analyzes her hit song, "Isn't it Ironic" to see if her examples are actually ironic. And CLICK HERE for a smile.
The Best Principal in the Galaxy sent this link of Dr. Jeff Goldstein to her teachers today: click here
I'm thinking about the metaphor of teachers as light. Some students have dark home lives, dark thoughts; some think their future is dark. The photo is of Helen Keller and her awesome teacher, Annie Sullivan, who became Helen's eyes. Well, I, too, am in the enlightenment business! I want to let my light shine. How I pray that this is The Year for my students, if they haven't already experienced one, The Year their eyes open wide, a year of social, emotional, and intellectual delight: oh, let there be LIGHT!
This September I'll have class full of ultra-reluctant learners--and I am excited about having them! It's a class for students who are below basic in reading or math. Our school started it two years ago, and it has evolved into a tutoring/study hall/on-line reading and math program.
In addition to increasing their reading and math abilities and confidence, my hope is to impact their mindset. These kids, even more than the others, have generally been mentally feral, left to feed on TV and videos, raised by their impulses and the media, consequently serving the twin gods, Immediate Gratification and Self.
I propose sharing with them stories of ordinary people who have done extraordinary things, who have shown courage, surmounted difficulties, or otherwise acted with greatness of heart. I may not transform them all into vital, literate, community pillars, but I am gunning to shatter that hard apathetic crust, to watch their minds expand to believe that their efforts really ARE more important and efficacious than their perceived abilities. And I have 36 weeks to go for it.
If you know of inspiring or motivational stories that kids (mostly boys) aged 12-15 would enjoy, please let me know!
Ideally I'd like to have 36 solid ideas. Ten down, 26 to go!
I leave you with Chuck's famous words:
"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company...a church....a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past...we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude...I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you...we are in charge of our attitudes." — Charles R. Swindoll
This morning I saw my friend Malcolm Guite had a cool word study on his MugBook page:
In Greek the word "euangel" literally means good message (hence good news) , or more literally "good angel", (angel meaning "messenger" or "bearer of news"); this is the root of the latinised English word "evangelist". But when the word was first translated into Mediaeval English it was translated "good spell" (written "godspel"). "Spell" at that time meant "word", and also curiously, "play", and "enchantment" (related also to spiel - game or play) and the word "god spell" was eventually contracted to 'gospel'.
So of course I visited his blog--he is a professor at Cambridge University in England, as well as an Anglican priest, a poet, a Harley lover. He'd posted this gem under the title "The Daily Miracle":
What a miracle that you should be reading this! The everyday miracle that we call ‘reading’, a miracle of interpretation, of leaps from shapes on paper, to unsounded sounds in the mind, leaps from sounds to meaning, and from common meaning to a communion of minds! We take it all for granted, we scarcely notice what we are doing, but sometimes we should pause and reflect what an extraordinary achievement literacy is, and how privileged we are to be able to do it.
Method? Drowning. You thought I was gonna say paper cuts, didn't you.
I sit here staring at eight stacks of English on my larger-than-average coffee table, eight stacks created from boxes of random papers. There's a pile of history papers on the floor that is particularly bugging me because I optimistically and mistakenly believed I had filed every last one of them. The history papers only seem spiteful, not scary, since they are easily put into binders that I spent a week organizing*.
But those eight stacks?? EIGHT?? There could've been more, but I collapsed some units together:
1) launching the course/benchmarks/book lists
2) narrative/lit analysis
3) persuasive/research/nonfiction
4) novels/bios
5) grammar/vocabulary
6) Holocaust/civil rights accessories
7) cool ideas/wonderful images/no idea where to file this thing
8) poetry
Now, each stack (average height=four inches) needs to be put in order. Sometimes looking at all this paper makes me wanna grab a flamethrower to get rid of these, quit my job, and go hug trees to make up for things. But I can't--I like my coffee table too much.
Imagine my delight in finding this post from Angela Watson's awesome thecornerstoneforteachers.com blog: a great resource for planning my future taming of the Paper Monster! It's of no immediate help for the stacks I'm confronting; I still have days of decision making and sorting. But ah, these stacks are the result of a lack of systems to deal with the tsunami of paper that overwhelms me daily in the classroom; Angela's categories will help me win against my relentless enemy. God bless her!
*To the left is Round One of the epic Lola vs the Paper Monster, 2010. (I won this one.) Round Two is in effect right now, and I am too lazy to take a pic of the heavily laden larger-than-average coffee table.
If you care about the pervasive and icky use of "alot" when "a lot" is the right way, please treat yourself to this--I plan to get permission to use it next year in my classroom!
I read this on Angela Powell's awesome blog, The Cornerstone Blog. I love what she writes, I love how she thinks, and I love that even though she teaches littler ones that the issues we encounter overlap as much as they do--the meta-issues of pedagogy and learning....Here she is:
It seems like teaching is getting harder because it IS: we’re attempting to reach more kids than we used to, and address a wider variety of issues and needs. It’s critical for educators to understand the magnitude of what we’re attempting without letting the results overwhelm us. Low-performing students from ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ and those with learning problems are no longer siphoned off into special education classrooms while we wait for them to drop out. As much as we bemoan the pitfalls of NCLB, in our daily practice we are in fact attempting to leave no child behind—not even the ones who WANT to be left to their own devices, or who don’t have the cognitive or emotional capabilities to try. And the 3 R’s are just the tip of the 21st century iceberg: we want our kids to graduate with technological and communication skills, well-developed creativity, interactive problem-solving abilities, financial savvy, an applied understanding of personal health and nutrition, environmental awareness…and the list is growing every year. We are trying to do it all, and we’re expected to succeed. Yet we cannot become discouraged when our students, our administrators, or we ourselves fail to achieve an increasingly impossible mission. When teachers become overwhelmed, the cycle of learning and growth is stopped cold.
