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Category Archives: personal goals

I’m a big believer in setting concrete goals for myself, as a teacher, writer, mother, poet and more, and in these posts, I will discuss goals made, accomplished or modified.

Taping My Teaching, and Thoughts on Evaluation

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Evaluating student performance is a big part of teaching, but another complicated aspect is how we can evaluate our courses and our own performance in them. Teacher evaluation is a hot topic these days, as people talk about performance bonuses, teacher tenure and the impact good teachers can have on students, but how do we know what make a great teacher and also, how can we see how to improve ourselves?

One tool for teachers is having themselves taped while teaching, as Larry Ferlazzo writes about in this post. He was not only working with a consultant who taped him, but then proffered the footage to his students and conducting a discussion of what they think they saw and they think he should take away from that. I love the dual focus on what the teacher and students need to be doing for effective learning; in reading this description, it seems so powerful and so constructive, and almost guaranteed to help a motivated teacher like Ferlazzo improve his teaching. But I feel a shudder of fear at the idea myself–offering myself up to my students to critique so openly?

This idea of equity in vulnerability is one I’m familiar with from writing workshops, and one that Penny Kittle spoke about it in Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing, but while I’ve adapted my teaching in many ways based on books I’ve read over the past few years, this is one big area in which I’ve made little progress. I would guess I’m not alone in this; teaching is a full-body job where we are already constantly being judged by our students, and we are all aware of this. Recently on Facebook, a friend of mine wrote about the evaluations she got from her most recent students, who commented on her teaching style and course material, but also on her wardrobe, body type, general appearance and workout habits. This style of candor is less common at the high school level, but not because they aren’t thinking it! I’m sure asking students is valuable, but I think the taping would bring a valuable and constructive focus to their comments.

At a recent faculty meeting, we traded the evaluations we do in our courses and debated how best to structure them, when to offer them, and how many times during the year we evaluate our courses. It gave a lot to think about for my own evaluations, but taping myself? That would be a big leap in evaluating myself and my teaching, and I think it’s a worthy goal for my near future.

Teaching Literature and Music

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mixtape

mixtape (Photo credit: miss_rogue)

The sweet spot between literature and music has always fascinated me, as both are among the primary forces that shape my life and how I see my place in the world. In teaching, I’ve tried to weave them together whenever I can, using music to introduce elements of tone and theme when discussing novels, and sometimes sharing songs with my students that I think connect to our texts. So far, I’ve seen three major ways to connect music and literature, all of which could have great implications in the classroom.

Type One: Literary Mixtapes

The major source for Literary Mixtapes I’ve found is at Flavorwire, a real treasure trove for book and music lovers. They’ve done mixtapes for characters from Holly Golightly to Harriet the Spy and tons in between, and the newer ones connect to Spotify playlists, which is even better for me.

My friend Dana Huff also made mixtapes on Spotify for Holden, Gatsby, Harry Potter, Lady Macbeth. This could be a great assignment for teaching characterization, especially for these kinds of complex characters, really encouraging students to delve deep into that character’s identity and the forces that have shaped it.

Type Two: Music Mentioned Explicitly in Book

This is a fun project for books that are built around certain musical forms or that mention music explicitly in the book. I’ve subscribed to a playlist on Spotify that compiles all the opera mentioned in Bel Canto , for example. This is great especially if you are unfamiliar with the style of music or with certain songs, and can really enrich your reading experience. As far as the classroom goes, I would see this more as an extra credit project, as it doesn’t really address literary elements, but it could prove that a student did a close enough reading of the book to catch every song reference. One recent popular YA novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, would lend itself really well to an assignment like this.

As a book-and-music nerd, there are a few playlists I’d like to tackle myself. The first would be a pair inspired by a great book I read recently, This Is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl (review coming soon). One playlist would be of the songs that are mentioned as inspiring Dave Grohl as a musician, which run the gamut from the Beatles to Metallica to Fugazi, and others might be songs by Dave himself in his assorted bands: Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Them Crooked Vultures, Queens of the Stone Age, etc. The other would be a playlist of all the songs mentioned in High Fidelity, which would be a massive undertaking, but such fun!

Type Three: Music That Accompanies the Book

This is the category I’ve had the most luck with as far as classroom assignments. In a senior elective I taught last year, I gave them the option of making a soundtrack for King Lear and got a few really outstanding examples, where the students clearly put a lot of thought and care into matching up the songs with different characters, tones, themes and plot points. Inspired by that success, this year I gave my freshmen the option of making a soundtrack for The Catcher in the Rye, and the examples I’ve gotten so far show a real understanding of the novel. Coincidentally, as I was working on this post, Dana did a blog post about theme songs for books, which would be a great shorter assignment as well.

I find this to be a wonderful assignment because while it usually produces high levels of student engagement, it also encourages them to make connections between the novel and their own lives, which is one of the key reasons I think it’s important to teach literature at all. Music is a big deal for many teenagers, and so this meets them on their own turf, but as a music fan myself, it gives me a chance to connect with them and the choices they make.

 

 

In the future, I’d like to try some lessons built around music and song analysis, connected to literature. The Experience Music Project in Seattle has some great resources on its website for lesson plans, oral histories, and multimedia timelines, and I’ve thought a lot about their free distance learning courses for teachers. Also, it’s just an amazing place to visit, if you’ve never been. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland also has some great resources on its website, including lessons and units and information about a summer teacher institute, which has just earned a spot on my professional development dream list!

52 Songs, 52 Stories

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Someday, if I’m feeling ambitious and ready for a challenge, I’m going to do a version of this amazing project: 52 Songs, 52 Stories. The blogger chose a song each week, posted a video for that song and wrote a very short story inspired by the song. He was inspired by several projects, including A Month in Music, where a blogger played his music collection continuously, on shuffle, for 30 days and wrote about what he heard each day. If I did a similar year-long project, I would not only write flash fiction, but also flash creative nonfiction, riffing on the songs I chose but also soliciting reader requests, I think.

This is the kind of inspiration, however, that I think would be easily adaptable, as writing prompts for poems or any short pieces of writing, especially for people like me who think about their identities or periods in their lives in terms of music.

Writing Goals: Jumpstart Edition

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One technique that works for me in goal-setting is making sure I have some concrete tasks to check off as I make progress, in addition to larger conceptual themes. In keeping with my writing jumpstart program, here are my specific writing goals for 2012:

If you notice, there’s a pattern here having to do with submissions, my most-dreaded portion of the writing life. Trying to do the whole tackling-it-head-on thing.

Just as with my other resolutions, I’ll be posting when I have success in meeting these goals too.

Jumpstarting My Writing

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The keyboard of the Malling-Hansen writing bal...

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As important as writing is to me, and as central as it is to my identity and conception of myself, when something has to drop from my daily juggling act, too often, it’s writing. So for 2012, I’m determined to jumpstart my trajectory as a writer and poet. This is a broader goal, not a concrete one, which means I need to think creatively about how to accomplish it and what that might look like, and what the steps toward success might be.

Thanks to my poet friend Christine Stewart, I’ve got some specific ways to get started on reinvigorating my writing routines. As always, Chris has a pile of fun, creative and reflective ways to start thinking about this, so I’m feeling inspired to get started. Right now, I’m thinking my theme will be “commitment,” in line with my determination to shuffle writing higher on my priority list as often as I can.

Another interesting exercise I’m planning to try is inspired by this post of Penelope Trunk’s on things she wishes she had written, and what that told her not only about her dreams for her writing career, but about the accompanying emotions each evoked in her. As provocative and disturbing as Trunk can often be, I also find her writing to frequently be insightful and inspiring, and this entry was a great example. I often think I’d like to have written some of the many amazing Dear Sugar columns, for example (the one on your invisible inner terrible someone blows me away every time I read it), but I don’t aspire to being an advice columnist, per se, so what is it exactly about Sugar’s writing that I’d like to emulate? I think it’s not only her eloquence, but her candor and compassion, so how can I incorporate those threads into my work?

Finally, I sat down and drafted a list of specific writing goals for the year, which I’ll share in an upcoming post.  In the past, I made lists of broader goals, but I didn’t find those to be motivating as I would like, so I’m working on a specific list, as those seem to be more effective for me.

Purging My Books

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This weekend, I began Phase One of a larger decluttering project: purging our enormous collection of books over the coming year. This is the kind of project my mother has been hounding me to do for years, and one I’ve tackled in smaller ways before, but am committed to following through on this time. Here are the steps, as I see them:

  • There are four major locations in our house where we have collections of books: each of the three bedrooms we use, as well as the front room downstairs, which we call the “piano room” but I also think of as our library, and was probably called the “parlor” a century ago when the house was built.
  • Each of these locations needs to be tackled individually to sort out which books are no longer necessary.
  • These books then need to be gathered up and dropped off at the Baltimore Book Thing.
  • Auxiliary locations must be addressed: the kitchen shelf with my cookbooks on it, the box of books I suspect is lurking in the basement, my classroom shelves.
  • Bookshelves should be cleaned/dusted.
  • Any unshelved books need to be shelved.

First up was the piano room, which I began while my husband shouted at the Ravens-Houston football game and my kids played upstairs.  In earlier purges, I’ve targeted novels I never liked or will never read, as well as graduate school texts I will never use again, but this time, I found myself being able to eliminate even more categories.  A lot of my parenting books are gone now, the ones about babyhood, toddlerhood, raising little girls and new motherhood, and I winnowed my graduate school books down even further.  At this point, I’ve got a laundry basket full of books, as well as three heavy black trash bags, all ready to be set free, back into the world.  I dusted all the shelves (or at least, the fronts of them and the tops of the remaining books), and did a purge of knickknacks while I was at it.  There are some piles of books on my bedroom floor, so my next goal is to move them all downstairs in the hopes that they will fit on the downstairs shelves now.  Sometimes I think about sorting the library shelves by category, but I just don’t think I’m organized enough to maintain that!

Purging my books has been hard for me in the past, and it’s still a daunting task, but I felt calmer about it this time, and it was much easier to let go.  Looking at titles about raising two-year-olds, I knew that part of my life was over, and if I ever do another graduate degree, I have a much better sense about what it will or won’t include.  As my life has gotten more focused, I think my personal library has too, and that seems like a good thing.

Reducing Screen Time: Strategies

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English: A child watching TV.

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One of the resolutions I’ve made for 2012 that is most daunting for me is to reduce screen time. This has been an ongoing desire of mine, but I’ve not yet found the strategies that work for me. Here’s a list of some I’m considering:

  • keeping a screen time log for myself for a week (I expect this to be horrifying, which is probably exactly why I should do it)
  • setting some get-active goals and tracking my progress
  • eating dinner in front of the TV less (I know, it’s a horrible habit and bringing the end of Western civilization closer and closer)
  • being active during screen time, including doing stretches or lifting weights while watching TV. I think using screen time for active Wii games would be a good switch here too.
  • cutting down on the most purposeless/time-suck ways I am on the Internet.  Blogging is okay, stupid gossip websites are less so.  And specifically, maybe check those embarrassing sites once a day, but no more.
  • I think it would also be helpful to make a list of “good” uses of screen time: blogging, Family Movie Night, shows like “Top Chef” I enjoy watching with my girls, and let myself off the hook for those.
  • accepting that I don’t need constant access to my inboxes and that sometimes, emails can wait until later to be answered. I don’t think I could fall asleep without checking my work email in the late evening at least once, but I certainly don’t need to check as often as I do.

The big piece will be focusing on myself; I think I do fairly well in monitoring my children’s consumption and screen hours, as well as keeping screens out of the bedrooms, but my own habits have gotten untenable. I don’t have a smartphone, which I think is good for me, but my laptop is on far too often, and too often I’ve got the TV on in the background as well.

Blech. I know this isn’t a new insight, but I really think one of the road blocks to keeping resolutions is that trying to be a better person also means acknowledging all the ways in which you fall short, and who wants to think about that for too long?

Newsflash: resolutions also often involve stopping doing things that are easy, and replacing with things that are hard.  Sigh.

Resolution Check-In

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Laura at Geeky Mom just did a resolution check-in that inspired me to do my own, so here goes:

  • clean out the basement and buy a chest freezer: no progress at all, but to be fair, this was always a summer/spring break project
  • go to a poetry reading and join a poetry group: no reading plans, but have been in talks with a friend about a group, and it looks like it is moving forward
  • write 100 blog posts: I’ve written four so far, not including this one, which I think is doing well for less than two weeks into the year
  • go to the beach: again, not on tap for January!
  • reduce screen time: no progress at all.  Must develop some concrete strategies for tackling this one: post coming soon.
  • exercise more: I walked home from school once so far, which is 1.5 miles, and I have investigated a Pilates class I’d like to try, as well as inherited Wii Fit Plus with Balance Board from a friend. I also did a Just Dance session, which I enjoyed and am willing to count as light cardio. Not great, but not too bad.
  • finish War and Peace: no progress at all
  • write poetry: today I wrote a title, which I’m counting as progress.  Have a deadline coming up, so need to get moving on this.
  • keep a teaching journal: no progress, because I can’t find the one I bought specifically for this purpose and am frustrated with myself about it. Must resolve somehow.
  • spend more time with friends: so far this is probably my most successful resolution! I went for drinks and nachos with my fellow Girl Scout leaders and out for dinner and drinks this past weekend to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Already have plans for this coming weekend with a work colleague!
  • declutter: have bagged up some kitchen things, did some decluttering work in my bedroom today and was inspired by reading Laura’s strategies: only working for fifteen minutes at a time, and starting at the front of the house and working towards the back. My next step is to make a list of clutter flashpoints in my house and then tackle them one by one.

I think I’ll check in again in early February and only focus on the resolutions I’m currently working on, not the summer-dedicated ones.  Wish me luck!

2011: Year In Review

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As 2011 draws to a close, I look over the year and see where I’ve been and how it affected me; getting to review my year this way is one of the reasons I keep blogging. The opportunity to reflect is so important to me, and blogging is one of my major tools to keep this focus in my life. Not to mention, my memory seems to get worse and worse every year!

In January, I became active on Twitter, fell in love with The King’s Speech, and finished up my first senior elective with a windows and mirrors project. I thought a lot about high pressure parenting and sustainable marriages, two concerns that are always close to my heart.  February brought cautionary tales for teachers and the very beginning of a big project for me in March, my March Madness poetry tournament. I also set myself a poetic challenge and met it, with great success. I also felt ambivalent about spring break balance, which haunts me every year, I think.

It’s become a tradition of mine to spend April doing as many poetry-related activities as possible, so it was fitting that I wrapped up my tournament and challenged myself again (though with less success this time). April is also a big month for me as a GSA advisor, and I was proud to see my club members create our most successful Day of Silence yet. In May, my girls turned nine and my grandmother died, so it was a month spent with family, and thinking about gratitude. I got a little discouraged about teaching ambition and resorted to bribery.

And then it was summer! For whatever reason, I spent a fair amount of June posting about teaching. I considered keeping a teaching journal and even bought one by the end of the summer, though I have since lost it (must check my desk at school). I reviewed my evaluations, watched my students graduate and received the perfect end-of-year gift. In July, I got a little clutter crazy and fell in love with Spotify, an affair that is still raging today. I also continued my teacher-blogging streak, posting reviews of helpful books and thinking about professional development.

In August, I finished my thirty-second year and turned 33, and spent my birthday exactly how I would have liked. I also made two resolutions, regarding organizing my wardrobe and focusing on fitness. Unfortunately, my fitness resolution has progressed more in fits and starts, but on the brighter side, my closet focus has really made my life easier. In September, I kept up my healthy momentum, reflected on priorities and had a tough disappointment in my own balancing act. But I also embraced my inner dictionary nerd and reviewed a book that continues to influence my teaching.

In October, I was thinking and writing about social justice issues, about being a GLTBQ ally at school and in in families, and pondering my relationship with feminism. I reconnected with Hemingway and was pleasantly surprised at what I found, and in related news, reflected on my Kindle. In that same reflective mood, I thought about who I am, who I was, and what decisions led me here.

In November, I set myself a fun cooking challenge, made my first pizza crust, and spent some time in grading jail. I read a childhood favorite with my girls and got some great poetic news.  December saw us struggling with a very itchy foe, as I struggled with work overload and my girls learned some homework lessons. In gearing up for Christmas, I thought a lot about screen time and usage, and how I friend or don’t friend my students on Facebook.

Wrapping up the year in reflection, I have been so pleased with two ongoing projects of mine: my outfit journal and my gratitude journal, both of which have made my life easier and more peaceful. I also made some goals and resolutions for the upcoming year.

Thank you for coming along on this journey with me, and I hope you have a wonderful New Year.

Goals and Resolutions

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43 Things list - reading, before the cull

Image by pragmatic_pete via Flickr (not my list)

Two years ago, inspired by The Simple Dollar, I made a series of posts dedicated to goals of mine in the areas of blogging, writing, and personal and family life. At the end of that year, I joined 43 Things and set myself some more, from painting my staircase to writing a new poem each month, reading War and Peace and keeping a gratitude journal.

So how did I do? Well, on the 2010 goals, I made huge progress on my writing and blogging goals, but continue to struggle with personal goals like exercising and cooking healthier for my family. On the 43 Things goals, I painted my staircase and kept the gratitude journal very successfully, but never got deeper than 100 pages into War and Peace and wrote only a handful of new poems. I spent some time recently going through my goals and resolutions and added some new ones for the upcoming year; I’m PatchworkJackie there if you want to join me. Some of my goals include joining a poetry group and cleaning out my basement, as well as keeping a teaching journal, exercising twice a week and buying a chest freezer.

Trent at The Simple Dollar always takes some heat from his commenters for setting lofty goals they think he’ll never reach (losing a pound a week, finishing two novels in 2012). I sometimes think I should only set fewer, more accessible goals too, but I think it’s silly to feel ashamed of not holding up to some of your resolutions. If you only set easy goals, it’s not much of an achievement to meet them, and you won’t feel the same sense of accomplishment.

I knew a writer once who said her goal for the year was to get more rejection letters, because that would mean she was frequently sending out with her work, with great ambition.  Setting that goal ended up earning her more acceptances than she had ever received before, and I think the same theory applies to any goals.  The more you set, and the higher you aim, the more likely the odds of achieving greatness.

Here’s wishing for a 2012 full of success and adventure!

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