Three Cold Tater Tots

Today was one of the longest teaching days I've had in awhile.  In addition to my regular circus show at the high school, I also taught my first night class in some twelve years.  I'd forgotten how grueling they were.

Part of the problem is that I have been worrying about the class for two weeks now.  I even had nightmares last night in which I couldn't find the classroom, couldn't work the technology, had forgotten everything about literature I ever knew.  I have been fortifying myself with caffeine all day to remain functional, and my body is even now shaking because of how "done" it is with that strategy.

Nothing that one is stressed out over that much is ever going to go well, probably.

My first impression was how much I missed my little classroom.  I get so used to having everything I need at my fingertips, on a shelf, in a drawer, that being transplanted somewhere else was a huge adjustment.  Not since my days at Aichi University have I done the traveling bag-o-stuff teacher routine.  Even there, I was usually close to my office, so if I found myself in need of something, I could just run back.  Tonight, I felt a little like a castaway, just me and my little raft of supplies staying afloat.

And I think my raft had a bit of a leak.

Even though I had planned, I didn't have nearly enough to fill the long night class.  My pacing was all off.  We finished too early, and now I feel like I failed somehow.  The funny thing is, I'm sure the students were as happy as only a night class student let out early can be.  I'm surprised they didn't all grow wings and simply fly away in beatific joy.

I sat in the classroom after everyone was gone and worked on the plans for next week.  It won't happen again, folks.  Two teachers and a small army of assistants couldn't get all the way through what I've got set up for next Monday.

I turned out all the lights, shut down all the computers, and walked through the beginnings of a heavy rain to my car.  The drive home was an adventure due to road work which had erased all the stripes on two lanes of interstate and interspersed it all with cones and unexpected surface height shifts.   The rain that had been drizzling at the college came down enough to slow traffic to a crawl. When I finally got home, I was exhausted and discouraged.  I grabbed the Sonic bag that had held my ersatz dinner, and inside were three sad, cold tater tots.  I sat with the door open, rain spattering on the arm rest, and ate them one by one.

Next Monday won't be like this.  There won't be a lackluster lesson (we have THREE pieces of literature to look at next week spanning THREE separate literary movements, I-thank-you-very-much).  I won't have a cup of Sonic fried chicken as my main evening meal.  I will have a teacher kit that boggles the mind on hand.  There will be PowerPoints, handouts, guiding questions, and yes, maybe even drama.

But never again, Scarlett O'Hara hand clenched and God as my witness, will there be an empty classroom too early and three sad cold tater tots in the bag at the end of the day.

Press Passes

I made these today.  I am probably twelve times as excited about them as any of the students will be, but hey.  Take your joy where you find it, right?

34-second Tour

Today, a huge tree fell on a power line, and we wound up having to dismiss early since we had no electricity. While I was waiting for campus to clear, I shot this.  Maybe the lovely Punch Brothers music will keep you from having vertigo....

34-second tour of my classroom #flipagram made with @flipagram . http://flipagram.com/f/aSvKxsfeZ7

Shakespeare in Action

Yesterday, at long last, all the preliminaries were over.  The handbook was covered and tested.  The syllabi were out of the way.  The classroom procedures were established.  It was time for the activity I’d been waiting a month to try.

I gave the students a copy of the “Twelve Ages of Man” speech from Twelfth Night.  Just as the group of teachers had done in the summer academy, the class and I read it together chorally, and I asked them to make notes.

I have to admit being a little nervous about this approach.  It’s worlds different from the way I have traditionally addressed Shakespeare.  Instead of defining all the potentially-problematic words and presenting tons of scaffolding related to history or culture, I was letting the language stand on its own.  The students didn’t even know which character had said it. 

As I walked around, I was thoroughly pleased to see all the students busily marking up their passages, and their notes were insightful and on-track.  No one was fussing.  No one was throwing up hands in frustration.  At this point, I successfully managed to resist the urge to jump up and down in the back of the classroom and clap my hands in glee.  Dignity, people.  Always dignity…. (And if you’ve never seen Singin’ in the Rain, you might not get the full measure of meaning for that quote….)

We read it again with each student reading to a strong mark of punctuation, just as our teacher group had all done when we were reading Hamlet together in DC.  Since reading aloud is a key fear for most of my students, I watched carefully to see how they received it.  Nobody even hesitated, even my shy ones. 

Another round of annotation followed, this time with them being asked to break up the passage into meaning groups or big ideas.  When we talked about it as a class, they all knew that the main theme was the passage of time and the stages of life, and they’d all identified what they were.  I hadn’t helped them.  I hadn’t provided a single translation.  I hadn’t done the endless background PowerPoint of doom illustrating what a “pantaloon” was.  They still got it.

That’s when it hit me.  They.  Still. Got.  It.

Since we have only 50 minute periods, we were reaching the end of our time when I had each group “pick-a-stick” from a numbered collection of popsicle sticks I keep for these things, and whatever number they drew became their “age” to act out in a one-minute pantomime the following day.  I expected eye-rolling or hesitation, but without exception, every student began eagerly talking to his or her partner about what they could do, making lists of props, and looking around my room for things they could use.  As the bell rang, they bustled out full of energy and ideas, already practicing gestures.

Today, we did a final quick review with each person reading just one line before passing it on to the next reader.  Then they put their scenes together, and the creative interpretation of Shakespeare’s words flowed.  One group used a balled-up wad of paper and a quickly bundled hoodie to construct an infant who was then “fed” from a bottle of blue Powerade.  Another group had a black-jacketed death stalking a cane-wielding “old woman” and gently pulling her down.  A third had a group member turn herself into the scales of Justice who passed an owl figurine from my giant collection to another student who drew a beard and mustache on her own face in an action of total commitment to the role.  I have known for years that my students are capable of wonderful things when they do creative assignments, but with as little preparation time as they had, it struck me again how good they are at it and how much fun they had while doing it.

After the acting, I passed out my “fancy” new whiteboards and told each group to pick three of the ages and give pros and cons for each.  After they’d had time to confer, I used the Folger website to pull up the close-up images of the Seven Ages window that had fascinated me so during my time in the Reading Room and the students looked at the individual characters  and related their pros and cons for each as we examined it.  I concluded by asking them to come a consensus as a group about to which “age” seniors belong.  The answers were as diverse as the people.  Some saw themselves as soldiers fighting for fame and honor.  Some saw themselves as lovers.  One group said infants; just beside them, a group claimed to be justices, the pinnacle of knowledge. 

When the bell claimed them again, they headed out the door full of discussion about who was right, swapping evidence and justifications, and my little teacher heart was absolutely full.  Without more than a minimum of assistance - perhaps the defining of two words - they had gotten there all on their own and, most importantly to me, they had made a connection.  I’d seen the looks of dismay yesterday when Shakespeare’s name was mentioned.  All of that was gone as they left.  They’d had a good encounter with the Bard.  He’d been a source of laughter and relevance for them instead of some monolithic obstacle.

Even though I love to teach Shakespeare and look forward to it all year long, today he became something for “everyday use.”  I don’t have to keep him in a special box and bring him out only for fancy occasions or my mega-Hamlet unit.  I can have the joy of watching my students discover him in small doses.  Maybe he can become their solace, too, or at least less of an object of dread or discomfort.

How liberating for all of us.

The First Days

If you're wondering where the posts have been lately, I think this image sums it up.  The first few days of school are something else, full of procedure and change.  They tend to leave me feeling as though a speeding bus clipped me.  That being said, we had a really good opening of school this year.  Everything went very smoothly. We had Open House this afternoon, and that concludes the preliminaries.  

My classes look really good this year.  I'm especially excited about my newspaper staff.  It's a really tiny group, but they have already come up with so many good ideas.  Their enthusiasm is contagious.  I can't wait to see what our product looks like when we can get all the pieces in place.

Tomorrow will be the first day past the class meetings and the handbook review and the schedule changes.  I have been waiting patiently for it.  I'm going to try an activity from the Folger Summer Academy with my AP students.  Fingers crossed.....

Voices from the Past

This is my second year to do a beginning of the year bulletin board containing advice from my former students to my current ones.  I like the way it connects the past and the present.

Dollar Tree Is a Teacher's Best Friend

Today's Dollar Tree MVP item is the plastic party tablecloth.  A basic black one became the foundation for a pair of bulletin boards I had to get ready in a hurry, but I found they have exciting new patterned ones, too, which I scooped up for later use.

(What do you mean normal people are not excited by bulletin boards or tablecloths?  I don't understand you....)

What We Were....

A colleague brought this by.  She found it in a cabinet in her room.  Newspaper is my great mountain to climb this year.  I'm excited, but I know this year is going to be a seat-of-the-pants journey.  This gives me a goal to shoot for.  Someday, I hope we will have another one to put beside this.

The Way It Starts

I am mentoring a new English IV teacher this year, a true first-year, brand-new, just-out-of-the-box teacher.  As a part of that process, I have been trying to pass on things I've been given or learned over the years.  Some of these things are "hard copies," a copy of the text book, a sample syllabus, a few extra supplies, activities and resources that have worked for me in the past.  Some of these things are far more intangible, information that the copy room will be jammed from the crack of dawn to the time they run us out with sharp sticks tomorrow, the strange and mystical power of a shower curtain hung on Command hooks stuck to the front of a bookcase to hide mountains of chaos, the locations of the cafeteria, counselors, and mail room, the fact that our administrative secretary and our facilities manager are all-knowing and almighty magicians who keep our little universe upright and spinning.

This evening, after a quick tour of campus, I asked my fledgling if there were any other questions, and when I asked it, my own first year in K-12 suddenly loomed large in my mind.  There was so much that I didn't know that I was even unaware of my own spectacular ignorance.  

(And that's probably just as well.  Had I known how clueless I was, I probably would have run away as fast as the ancient Evil Jeep would have permitted.)

I was fortunate to have had two wonderful veteran teachers who took me under their wings and made sure I didn't just crawl into the space under my desk and hide there giggling hysterically.  I was doubly fortunate to have parents who were classroom teachers as well.  Even with all their assistance, learning took time.  I didn't know we had a photocopier on campus until nearly Christmas....  (Look.  It was a really, *really* hectic semester, okay?) 

As helpful as the veteran teachers I had access to were, there were so many things I had to figure out for myself.  Since I came to it alternate route from adult collegiate English as a Second Language instruction, I was caught more than a little flat-footed when I transitioned into a high school classroom quite literally two days before the opening of the school year.  Suddenly, I was surrounded by a sea of procedure with which I was totally unfamiliar, shorthand names for locations and people everyone assumed I knew, and enough new K-12 education acronyms and jargon to fill a dictionary. Vast quantities of my knowledge that first year had to come from trial and error.  I wonder how many afternoons I walked into one of my mentors' classrooms with a look of confusion on my face and a question on my lips.

Probably, it is this way for most of us.  Maybe there are teaching prodigies who walk in on the first day and know exactly how to handle every aspect of the profession with careless ease, but I have never met one.  Despite my best efforts, my mentee is going to have to puzzle out the things that work best for her by herself.  While I can expose her to ideas and to things I have found useful in my own practice, she will have to find what fits her teaching persona, her students and their needs.  All I can really do is try to smooth the way with the little things, offer resources and strategies, answer as many questions as she has whenever they arise, and keep telling her that "all will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well" (even though sometimes it really doesn't feel that way during the week of homecoming.  Or state testing. Or just prior to a major holiday.  Or approaching the full moon....).

Rest assured, when we parted this afternoon, she knew exactly where the copier was.....

Positively

I came back from the Folger Summer Academy full of fire and ideas.  It was like a tent revival for English teachers, I guess, or an encounter with what Prometheus stole from the Olympian hearth.  I felt real enthusiasm for getting back in the classroom and for trying some new approaches to teaching works I've loved for a long time.

Then the first day of PD hit me.  

It wasn't bad, I suppose.  In fact, we had a really good keynote speaker this year, someone who was sensible, moving, and meaningful, someone without a sales agenda. He was genuinely inspirational. It also seemed like everyone from the mayor on down the line was trying very hard to keep the meeting stripped down to those essential bits we simply must have every year.  I guess I just don't do meetings well. I never have.  The seats in the auditorium, while new, simply weren't built for my height, and the longer I sit in them, the more pain I'm in.  

The list of procedural things I have to get through seems to be growing exponentially whenever I look at it.  As I looked at checklists, additional duties, new policies, and detailed descriptions, I felt a definite snag in the flight of my joy for the new year. Due to a lack of sleep last night, stress today, and an overloud PA system, I wound up with the inevitable headache.  

Our last meeting came to a close, I tottered up the stairs to my classroom, took a big migraine pill, and laminated some stuff while waiting for its lingering fuzziness to abate before trying to get myself from school to home. When I finally got settled in my comfortable chair with a bowl of mini ravioli (don't judge, yo), an episode of the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice mini-series on Amazon Prime streaming, and my sweet cat Dillon curled around my neck on the back of the recliner, my thoughts cleared and I developed a new resolution.  This year *is* going to be a good one.  All the little bits of busywork that surround education in the modern age aren't going to destroy the desire I replenished this summer to help my students dive into literature and writing and discover.  

I keep thinking about what Dr. Sandy Mack said about the humanities during our session with him at the Folger:  "Science teaches us how the world works; the humanities teach us how to be human."  That task, that effort, is too important to let these little speed bumps discourage me from its pursuit.  Thursday, the students are going to arrive, and all the things I'm so excited about sharing with them are going to be in my hands like so many jewels.  I'm not going to let the other stuff keep me from being happy about sharing those riches and watching the students learn just how beautiful they really are.  I love my profession; I love the place in which I practice it; I love the students who go on these annual journeys with me.  Everything else is unimportant.

With that in mind, tomorrow, I'm sitting down front where my knees don't have to be compressed by the seatbacks of a row ahead of me; I'm packing a snack, a diet Mountain Dew, and a migraine pill in case of emergency or feeling like poo; I'm putting some origami paper in my notebook to keep my hands busy, and I'm going to get back on track for a joyous opening of school.

Shakespeare Is Ready

This bust of Shakespeare was given to me by a wonderfully sweet class many years ago.  It is one of my most prized possessions, one of those things I'd grab if I had to run out of building in case of disaster or fire.  I dress him up seasonally.  Right now, he's wearing the hat I bought at the Folger Shakespeare Library this summer and my Reader badge from my time there during the Summer Academy.  In the words of Muddy Waters, Shakespeare is as "ready as anybody can be."

A New Year Begins

Several people have told me I need to keep a blog about teaching.  This is my humble attempt at writing on the topic.  I haven't been very faithful to blogging for awhile, but since this is the beginning of a new school year, it strikes me now would also be a good time to start this new form of reflection about my practice.

What you can expect from this blog:

1)  Random snippets of my day
2)  Ideas and activities that have worked for me
3)  Ideas and activities from which the wheels came off completely
4)  Resources I've found
5)  Pictures of stuff in my classroom
6)  Whatever else seems to fit or is shiny enough to catch my attention at the time.

We'll see how it goes, people.  We'll just see how it goes.