RSS Feed

Tag Archives: Teacher

Why I Teach

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Jackie

“At the beginning of this year, English was the class I was most afraid of, and now at the end of the year, I think it’s the only class that hasn’t given me a panic attack. Thanks for watching out for the dyslexics and making everyone feel safe in your classroom.”

“My mom read over a paper of mine I wrote for my theater class, and when she was finished, she said, ‘Wow, Ms. Regales must be a really good teacher, because you have made so much progress in writing this year.’”

“Ms. Regales, the only word I can think of to describe you is SUNSHINE! If you have ever had a bad day, your students never knew it, and you always seemed so excited to see us and teach us this year.”

“This class was challenging and exciting; I never felt drowsy once, which cannot be said for all my classes.”

“You are a hard grader but that pushes us to the next level”

“You helped me see how hard I have to work to succeed”

“You care about our success and made me feel like you really wanted me to do well”

These are all statements my students have either said to me in the past two weeks, or have written on their end-of-year course evaluation. This year’s crop of freshmen is an especially sweet one, I think, but also, their words really made me think and smile and feel appreciated. What more could a busy teacher ask for, as the school year winds to a satisfying close?

2 Comments

Posted in education, teaching, writing and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Citrus Cake and Appreciation

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Jackie
Happy Teacher Appreciation Week 2006

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week 2006 (Photo credit: angegreene)

This weekend I had a fit of cooking and baking energy and made fudge krinkle cookies, applesauce banana bread, and a three-cheese pasta al forno for dinner on Sunday with homemade garlic bread. I finished with a citrus cake, baked in a tube pan and topped with a lemon-flavored powdered sugar glaze.

It’s the cake that stands out to me, though, because I baked it for the annual Teacher Appreciation Luncheon the PTA at my girls’ school holds each year, in honor of Teacher Appreciation Week. This year, the luncheon was held a little early because the school’s annual spring festival is on May 12. I’ve participated in both of these events for the past five years, but since my girls are changing school in the fall, this will be the last time I participate in either.

On the one hand, my life will be easier next year, logistically, and I’m looking forward to this big change for our family. On the other hand, however, my children have had excellent teachers at their current school, and we’ve found a wonderful community of parents and families there. We have tried to show our appreciation of the teachers in different ways throughout our time there, by volunteering in the classroom, sending in donations of supplies from paper towels to posterboard to pencils, and by purchasing books for all my girls’ teachers, current and former, at the Scholastic Book Fair each year. We try to show our appreciation of the community by volunteering at events like movie nights, field days, bake sales and book fairs.

While I have an array of fears about next year, one recent fear is that my girls’ current and former teachers and school community will think we are leaving because we are pissed off about public schools. My kids have had great teachers, and I hope they know how much we have appreciated them over the years. We are not leaving for any reason having to do with teachers, employees, or the treatment my children have received, and we are definitely open to returning to the public school system at some point in the future, if that turns out to be best for our girls.

There are certainly valid reasons to be pissed off with schools, and there are systemic and pervasive problems in many of our school systems, as well as how we think (and spend) nationally about education.The number of students in the average public school classroom, for example, is a big philosophical problem for me. But at the same time, there are thousands of teachers, employees and administrators who are doing their best to work within flawed systems for the good of the students they interact with every day. Are there bad apples in the bunch? Of course. Are there employees who take advantage of the flaws in the system? Sadly, of course. But that should not distract our attention away from the employees who are dedicating their lives to our kids, or from the systems that need to be reformed.

Related articles

1 Comment

Posted in conversations, education and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Taping My Teaching, and Thoughts on Evaluation

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Jackie

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.

Related articles

Leave a comment

Posted in conversations, education, personal goals, teaching and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

All Ninth Grade, All The Time

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Jackie
education

education (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

This is my first year teaching only 9th graders all year, as in previous years, I’ve been teaching juniors or seniors during the same year as well. Since I’m also on the 9th grade advisory team, this means that I’ve been immersed in this particular freshman class, which luckily happens to be a really wonderful group of girls. Next year, I’ll have a senior course in addition to my freshmen, but this year has been really interesting to me in terms of teaching one prep for multiple sections, and what drawbacks and benefits there are.

As often happens, ProfHacker has come up with a practical pedagogical article that, while written by/for the professoriate, is thought-provoking for high school teachers. Billie Hara writes about teaching multiple sections of a literature survey class and how the different demographics and dynamics of the sections pose some challenges. One of her favorite methods is Think-Pair-Share, which is one of my favorites as well. It’s useful for when you have a group of students who don’t want to talk much, or to encourage reflection in a class where everyone shouts out, or when you have one student who dominates the class discourse. I also like to have students write down their thoughts first and then share, which can serve all of the same purposes, but is also encouraging informal writing, which can often make students more at ease with formal writing when done repeatedly.

Another dilemma she mentions is what to do with pacing when you have one class that is capable of moving faster than the other sections, but for various reasons, you can’t really let them. It would make class planning a lot harder if you have three sections all at different places in a novel, and at the high school level, I don’t want the girls telling each other what happens next or being able to prompt each other with “right” answers for discussions or assessments. The other difficulty is that since my classes are all “regular,” not designated honors classes, I wouldn’t want one section (or their parents) to start wondering why another group was chapters ahead of them, and then believing that there was some kind of invisible tracking going on. I address this most often by differentiating discussion among my sections, making sure that each class hits the key points, but offering more scaffolding to one group while encouraging the next group to push even deeper into analytical thinking.

All in all, I’ve enjoyed my all-9s year so far, as much as I’m looking forward to developing my senior elective on Latin American literature too. I talked on Parents Night this year about how much I love teaching ninth graders, and while I saw some disbelief on some parents’ faces, it’s completely true. I enjoy teaching the kind of compositional and comprehension skills that are ninth-grade appropriate, I get to teach some really great literature, but also, ninth graders are just so much fun. They are still closer to children than young adults, for the most part, so while they aren’t always the most organized group, they are enthusiastic and curious in a way that older students are sometimes careful to hide. The analogy that springs to my mind most often is puppies: they’re tricky to train and they don’t always go where they are supposed to, but they are curious and lovable, excited and affectionate, and it’s thoroughly fun to spend your day with them.

Related articles

2 Comments

Posted in conversations, education, teaching and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Random Bullets of Grading Exams

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Jackie
  • Reason 14,950 I love teaching freshmen: they write me little notes in the margins of their exams, with exclamation points and smiley faces, and make little jokes about the questions and their answers
  • Quandary #1: if my students do very well, on average, on a section of their exam, is it because they studied effectively, I taught it effectively, or I mistakenly wrote the questions as to be too easy?
  • Related: one of the many aspects of teaching that is much harder than people realize is the art of writing a useful exam, one that is sufficiently rigorous but within a well-prepared student’s reach. I find writing essay topics much easier.
  • Quandary #2: is it fairest to put all students in the same type of testing environment–sitting in chairs at desks, no music, fluorescent lights, no snacks, in groups of 15-50 other test-takers–or would it be fairest to let them choose a few conditions they’d prefer to have during testing, and them group them in different locations accordingly?
  • Even though I am completely convinced that it would be incredibly ineffective for my particular subject, sometimes I still wish I could do my whole exam on Scantron.  This usually happens when I’m faced with a fresh stack of exams, oddly enough.
  • I’ve never been the kind of teacher who collects all the exams and then sits right down to grade them; I usually take a break after the stress of exam week and semester’s end. However, this year, the English exam was the last in the week’s schedule, so my grading window is uncomfortably short.
Related articles

3 Comments

Posted in education, teaching, writing and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Teachers, Students and Facebook

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Jackie
Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

If you are my Facebook friend, you know that I am a frequent user of the site, checking in several times daily, posting pictures, commenting on statuses and syncing my music playlists through Spotify. I utilize all the site’s privacy features, but I definitely do a lot of communicating on Facebook. If you’ve been around long enough, you know that I even taught a university-level course on Facebook Culture for a few semesters, and that I am always looking for new ways to use teaching with technology. Finally, of course, I have been blogging for about eight years, presenting a (carefully curated) continuing portrait of my interests and personality.

All of this might lead you to believe that I have positive views on using Facebook to connect with my current students, and when I was teaching at the university level, I did set up a Facebook group for my courses and use it to communicate with students about course business. However, I was and am firmly opposed to connecting with my current high school students via Facebook, text messaging, or other non-school-related forms of communication.

For me, there are some key distinctions here: my high school students are still children, legally and emotionally, in ways that my college students were not. This means that inherently, there is a power dynamic present that any responsible adult should be very careful not to exploit. We often see this manifested as inappropriate sexual behavior, but what about the teacher who “friends” some students but not others, who sends chatty text messages to Janie but not Jenny? How does Jenny continue to feel fairly treated in that classroom? It also means that they still need us to be adults, to be safe adults in their lives and to draw boundaries for them about what is and is not acceptable and appropriate, including in matters of communication. Just like in parenting, we are not aiming to be our students’ “friends,” or our children’s “friends.” We are not their peers, and when we try too much to be, we erode our ability to continue to act as authority figures.

I feel like it’s important for me to clarify here that I don’t take this position because I’m embarrassed of anything my students would know about me if we were connected on Facebook; it’s categorically impossible for drunk photos of me to exist, for example, and I have no secret past as a sex worker.    Also, one work-around I have seen is for teachers to create separate FB accounts for their “teacher” persona, using the name of the high school as their middle name or simply naming themselves “Mr./Ms.” instead of their first name, so that they can still communicate with students on FB without linking their “real” accounts. If a teacher honestly felt that FB was the only effective way to reach their students, I can see this being useful.

It’s become an end-of-year tradition that once students at my school graduate, I see a rush of new requests and friendships popping up in my FB feed, for me and for my fellow teachers. This feels right and good; these students are moving into the adult world, and I’m glad to connect with them as they move forward. I learn about new music, see pictures of their happy faces in new cities, and ignore the mentions of drinking or the occasional swear. We trade links back and forth, and I love to see them when they come back to Baltimore. But for me, I can only really think of them as “friends,” FB or otherwise, once they are no longer my students, and that is as it should be.

Related articles

5 Comments

Posted in conversations, education, media mentions, teaching, technology and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

702

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Jackie

For each of my three classes, I’ve graded thirteen assignments in this first quarter, including regular reading-based homework, a presentation, short formal writing and a vocabulary test.  Since I have 54 freshmen this quarter, that means I will have graded 702 assignments in the first quarter of the school year.  If I keep a similar pace through the year, I will have graded 2808 assignments by the end of the year, which does not include 54 midterm exams as well as 54 final exams. Even if each piece only takes me five minutes to read and grade, that adds up to fifty-nine hours spent grading this quarter alone.  Of course, that doesn’t take into account the minutes and hours it takes to develop the assignments and enter those grades in my gradebook program. But even just for that, over nine weeks, I’ve spent roughly six and a half hours grading per week, and my students haven’t even turned in their first major essays yet.

Did I mention that a significant portion of this grading does not get done during the school day, due to actually teaching classes, attending a variety of meetings, and prepping for the next class I’ll teach?  Do I shudder when I think of how many pieces of graded work my public school colleagues review each quarter, with their exponentially higher teaching loads?  As an independent school teacher, however, this also means that I will write comments on each of these students for their first quarter report cards, comments of 5-8 formally written sentences discussing the student’s performance, personality, and aptitude, as well as recommendations for future success. I also did this for my freshmen at interim time, and will do it again several times during the academic year.

Now, am I unhappy to do all of this? No, absolutely not; as much as I might whine sometimes about the actual grading, I know that my grading is a key part of how I set my expectations and help my students meet them.  I take great care and pride in developing my assignments, writing detailed and specific feedback on grades, and crafting and polishing my comments.  I love my job, and I love performing it to the best of my ability.

The frustrating part for me is how many people have no idea of the hours that classroom teachers spend on tasks like this, the tasks students and parents don’t get to see us accomplish, the non-dynamic tasks that get done behind the scenes. I know I’ve written before about the irritating “180 days a year” public narrative, but times like this, when I’ve been grading for hours and still have a mountain of work ahead, not to mention a week’s worth of classes to prep and teach, I get a little cranky about it all over again.

Related articles

5 Comments

Posted in conversations, education, teaching and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

Review: I Read It, But I Don’t Get It

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Jackie
Cover of "I Read It, but I Don't Get It: ...

Cover via Amazon

Decision made: I ended up going with I Read It, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers first because it had some direct application for a project I’m working on with a colleague this summer. We’re developing a proposal for a summer program that would target struggling readers/writers in the first two grades of high school and give them a concentrated summer instructional experience to try and build whatever skills seem to need the most development. I think I’ll be going with Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements: How to Teach What Really Matters About Character, Setting, Point of View, and Theme next, so look for the review in the near future.

Anyone who has taught high school English, no matter where you are in the country or what demographic you’re teaching, has probably heard a student say, “I read it, but I don’t get it.” What part was trickiest? What was most confusing? Why do you think you didn’t get it? These are tough questions for most struggling students to answer, but without them, it can be near possible to help a student strengthen their reading skills. Cris Tovani tackles this task head-on in this book with a mix of anecdotes, strategies and assignments that she has tested for years in her own classroom, as well as in her work with training teachers.

If you’ve read about different adolescent literacy strategies, you may already be using some of the tools Tovani recommends here; I was pleased to see anticipation guides and double-entry journals, both of which I’ve used very successfully before. However, I also found some really potent examples of framing language and classroom activities that I think will become key elements of my reading discussions in class. I’ve long pondered how best to scaffold my students’ reading in our Bible as Literature unit, and I’ve got some fresh new ideas based on this book. Another crucial point was that while struggling readers will benefit most from these techniques, we’ve all seen even stronger students hit the wall when they come to a particularly challenging text, and these strategies can work for them as well when built into whole-class work. The language Tovani uses to identify for her students what “good readers do” and how to model those strategies will be invaluable to me, and will definitely help frame how I address these stumbling blocks in class.

Another big take-away for me was that students want us to go over the reading in detail in class, not always because they haven’t read (though that can also be the case), but because they don’t have confidence in their own abilities to construct meaning from the text. The more we do that work for them, the more they give up on being able to do it for themselves. In other words, this is another argument in the ongoing sage on the stage vs. guide on the side debate (that is often more polarized than it needs to be), but an argument that shows concrete ways to be that effective guide-on-stage. For me, as a fan of Paulo Freire, and especially his theories opposing the banking model of education, this supports my own philosophy of education as well. That said, when a student asks me about a part in the text she didn’t understand, my first impulse is to explain it to her, which is probably a byproduct of being a big book nerd in the first place, as many English teachers are. Now, with Tovani’s voice guiding me, I hope I’ll be able to resist that impulse more often.

All in all, I’d add this title to the list of essentials for any English teacher’s bookcase, and even go further by saying that if you’re in a reading-intensive subject, you and your students could greatly benefit from this book as well.

5 Comments

Posted in book reviews, education, teaching and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

End of Year Gifts

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Jackie
Assortment of gift cards

Image via Wikipedia

I got the best end-of-the-year teacher gift recently.

No, it wasn’t a gift card, or a box of chocolates, a pretty scarf or expensive perfume, though I have gotten all of those things before. It came in an envelope, didn’t cost a thing, and will be a gift I treasure forever.

The parent of one of my graduating students, a girl I never taught but worked with extensively in other capacities, wrote me a letter, in lovely penmanship on a thick ivory card, thanking me for the relationship I had built with her daughter and telling me how much it had meant to both of them. It brought me to tears, truthfully, and it was such a wonderful surprise to find in my mailbox.  Yes, high school teachers like to be thanked too.

When my daughter Sophie was in first grade, she had a really great teacher, who had just graduated and was in that dreaded first year of teaching. You could see, however, that she had all the hallmarks of success, and so one evening, I wrote her a note over email with some words of encouragement, teacher to teacher, but also as a grateful parent. This spring, two years later, I ran into her in Starbucks with her own mother, and she told her mother what a nice email I had written her, and how much it had meant to her.

The lesson? Every teacher appreciate cash, or a gift card to a restaurant or even a grocery or department store. But the gifts that really touch us, that give us strength, that inspire us? Tell us what we’ve meant to you and your family, and thank us for any way in which we’ve helped educate your children. It will mean the world to any teacher worthy of the name and profession.

And if you want, you can slip a gift card into the envelope too.

4 Comments

Posted in education, teaching and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Blogging With My Students

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Jackie

Way back last August, I wrote a really optimistic post about all the new endeavors I wanted to try this year in my teaching. In the spirit of reflecting on my teaching being one of the main reasons I still blog, I wanted to look back at this list and see how many I actually implemented.

Sigh. Sometimes reflecting is depressing.

First, my major accomplishments:

  • my students did blog all year, a blog for each text as well as a year-long blog for grammar and writing workshop activities.
  • we did connect with another 9th grade group in our study of Macbeth, which is currently ongoing but also currently unbloggable.

Now, for the misfires.

  • I set up a teacher blog for myself and just never used it; I think I had too many vague ideas for how to use it and need to instead focus on one concrete strategy to start with, and then I could add more later.
  • I didn’t do anything with wikis; the way they are set up on my website are much less intuitive than I had hoped they would be.
  • I didn’t add current events into my student blogging at all.

The aspect I’m most sorry I didn’t implement is blogging with my students. I’ve done this before in my college classes, and I’ve been blogging myself for about eight years now, so it only seems natural, but somehow it just hasn’t gelled yet. I read great articles on the advantages and practical pieces on the challenges, and I see what students can do and what teachers have done, but I still haven’t figured out the best way for me to begin.

This year, I am proud of what I did manage to accomplish, and will try to remember in the future that being overly ambitious can leave me frustrated and even overshadow anything I do manage to complete.

Better luck next year, I guess.

3 Comments

Posted in education, teaching, writing and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 493 other followers