Enjoy the Journey

Enjoy the journey.

That was what I promised back in August, while vacationing on the Rhode Island shore.  It seemed so simple, so clear then. Everyone who knows me knows I truly love the work I do; I was determined then not to allow disruptive forces to capsize my professional kayak.  I was resolute: I would protect my passion from pirates, piranhas, and politicians.

Enjoy the journey.

Then it was September. No sooner had the school year begun that stress exerted increasing pressure, rocking my little instructional boat, interfering with what used to be the joy of teaching.  I was paddling faster and harder than ever, but an angry current just kept pushing me backwards.  This was not the annual back-to-school angst or re-entry.  This force was different, malevolent, relentless, destructive.  For the first time  since I was a novice,  I felt unanchored. It was simultaneously  frightening and frustrating. The safety straps of my professional life jacket were giving way under the constant strain, and from early September till now, I have been navigating uncharted waters, fearing that I might be swept away by roiling tides beyond my control, angry that this was preventing me from doing what was best for kids.  It was all I could do to keep my craft afloat.  I found myself sailing in circles, desperate for nonexistent channel markers to show me the way.

Enjoy the journey.

But I am an optimist, a the-glass-is-half-full kind of girl.  So I continued to take some solace in the moments of smooth sailing on this traumatic voyage. At the heart of each day were the kids, kids who had never read The Pearl or met Ponyboy and the greasers, kids who were rightfully outraged by the hatred and shamed by the inhumanity of the Holocaust, kids who discovered their inner poets and essayists, kids who spun their own narratives and met their future selves.  I used every tool of the trade to keep us all buoyant in an alphabet soup of distractions and disruptions–MAPs, ELAs, APPR, RTTT, AYP. The seventh grade and I took an expedition to the Harlem Renaissance and we documented our visit to Langston Hughes in a DVD.  The adventure was fraught with unexpected obstacles–technology almost sank our raft–but in the end, we made it safely to our next port of call, stronger and smarter for the excursion. With the eighth grade, we traveled to the scariest of all destinations: ourselves, using the experiences of those more accomplished than we were to fuel our mojos. From Colin Powell’s Thirteen Rules, we derived our own guidelines for safe sailing; Sandra Cisneros dared us to do the impossible; Sonya Sotomayor’s abuelita showed us the power of unconditional love.

Enjoy the journey

What truly save me from death by water, though, were the people in my own corridor. I have been continually inspired and humbled by the strength and smarts of my colleagues who have been busy maintaining their own vessels under pressure equal to or greater than the waves that have threatened my ship.  I am amazed by their stamina and their courage.  Every day the people I am privileged to work with labor endlessly for the common good of the kids they are responsible for. Their lessons are creative and challenging and I could never, ever have survived this perilous journey–much less enjoyed it–without them.  I have learned so much from their skillful maneuvers and from their grace under pressure. Being among such seasoned souls has made me more able to conquer the choppiest of waters.  Being among such very fine people has allowed me not to lose faith in humanity.

Enjoy the journey.

After a year of hurricanes and squalls, sand bars and rip currents, we will soon dock.  My little craft will show the wear.  There will be places where rocks have ripped the hull and where sea water  has washed over the gunwales. It is my fervent hope–there’s that optimist again–that by August, I will be healed and will once again be able to make that new school year’s resolution to enjoy the journey.  But as of now, I cannot renew that promise.     

 

525,600 Minutes

One year.  4 seasons.  12 months.  52 weeks.

When my son first helped me create this blog, I secretly hoped I could do for teaching what Julie Powell did for cooking.  Instead of replicating 524 recipes in a year, I would dutifully record 365 tidbits about life in a public school classroom.

It was a mighty undertaking.  But if Julie could master the art of French cooking, I would try to recreate the complexities of American education.

And I really did intend to blog every single night.

Blogging possibilities truly are infinite. On any given day, the average teacher works around three technological catastrophes, averts four BFF squabbles, solves for X, sums up the causes of World War II, reads three dozen critical lens essays, sends two kids to the nurse’s office and dispenses eighteen minutes of life skills advice.

Yes, I would blog every night.
If there were eight million stories in the naked city, I knew there had to be at least a few hundred in my middle school English class.

And there were.  The trouble was that living in those minutes left me with little time to write about them.

But over this year, I have found time to publish 65 posts, 17 pages that have been “hit”  23,483  times.  What I have found is that everything can be related to teaching.  Everything.  Kitchen gadgets, golf, car maintenance, kayaking, the New York Yankees.

It isn’t that these things are really like teaching.  It is just that when you are a teacher, you see instruction in everything around you.  You see school in summer traffic jams.  You see a lesson in the nightly news.  You envision the journey of a school year as you paddle for the shore on an August afternoon or enjoy a delicious dinner in a new neighborhood restaurant.

So to all you who have taken the time to read what I have written, I send a huge thank you.  I hope to keep up the pace I set in this first year, though as we near the finish line of another academic term, writing time becomes more and more precious.

But if Julie could whip up Julia’s boeuf bourguignon, then I should be able to keep up with my own instructional recipes!

Worry About What You Can Control

      Today, in the pre-game interview, Suzyn Waldman asked Joe Girardi if CC worries about facing Verlander.   Joe’s answer applies to teachers as well as pitchers: “CC knows that he can only worry about the things he can control.”

Testing…Composite Scores…Politics

                      

Don’t Worry About What You Can’t Control

This is good advice for teachers, especially now, when so much of what is happening in education is beyond our control.  We can get worked up over the detrimental effects of widespread testing, we can lament the ways in which Danielson isn’t the objective, evidence-based evaluation it should, in theory, be, we can argue against the commercialization/politicization/vilification of teaching–and we would be justified on all counts–but we would be wasting our energy.

Ultimately, what we care about, what gets us out of bed and into work each day is what happens in our classrooms.  It’s about the kids, right? It’s sharing the content you love with your students.

Forget about Andy Cuomo or Arnie Duncan, neither of whom will ever know your students.  Forget about Pearson, whose flawed testing tells us next to nothing about what we need to do to be more effective. Keep telling yourself that it’s about the kids, stupid!

Easier said than done, though.   When the policy makers say that they expect test scores to nose dive, we see kids, not numbers. We see kids who trust adults to do what is best for them. We see kids struggling with questions we haven’t been able to prepare them to answer.

Then we see composite scores that will tell the world that we aren’t really so good at what we work so hard to do.

Don’t worry about what you can’t control.

I am trying very hard to take this advice to heart.

What Did You Want to be When You Grew Up?

               

When I was a kid, I wanted to be: an astronaut, a CIA operative, the girl singer in a rock and roll band, the next Olympic phenom, a trans-Atlantic stewardess (I know, but that’s what flight attendants used to be called), a go-go dancer on Hullaballoo, an ecologist.

By the time I got to high school, though, I had pretty much narrowed my choices: English teacher or Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter.

Undergraduate college profs pushed–no, shoved–me away from teaching. Smart people I respected kept telling me that writing was my future and at 20, I let ego think for me.   Hubris. Then, as now, I was proud of what I could do with words. I settled on a major in English lit with minors in history and journalism. With a portable electric typewriter I scored on the street for $5 and comic innocence, I imagined I would write my way into fame and, if I happened to be lucky, fortune, too.

Luckily, my true fortune intervened.

I married my high school sweetheart and before we knew it, we had two beautiful kids and our future required something substantial.  Love–and fate–had brought me back to teaching, albeit via the  the scenic route.  We added grad school to our monthly bills. Though we didn’t know it at the time, we agree that was one of the smartest risks we ever took.

I liked teaching from the start. And after a few years of experience under the wing of a veteran mentor, I became pretty good at it, too. It was fortunate, getting a second shot at education. Make no mistake, teaching is hard work.  Some days are frustrating.  Most days are exhausting.  But when it is about the kids, the interchange between us, I am so on.

You’re yawning now.        So what’s the point of this protracted stroll down memory lane?

It sometimes takes a while to find what you were meant to be when you grow up. It always takes a while to get good at what you were meant to be.

    Now, though, we are impatient for instant results.  We are accustomed to tapping a screen and getting answers, now, not later.   If we want to talk to someone, we have mobile devices that connect us where ever we are.

And that’s part of what makes us want to believe inputting data will provide an accurate means of education reform.  We want the numbers to tell us what to do. This supposedly works well enough in the business world.  Sales are either up or down, right?  Lawyers bill clients by the hour. Actuaries calculate risk through data analysis.

But education is a process. It is not instant.   Kids learn and grow at different rates.  Middle school teachers say good-bye to students before we can see if or how we have affected them.  If we’re lucky, kids visit, sharing their stories.  Every teacher can name the kids who seemed lost but who ended up doing amazing things.

There are no numbers to show how teachers influence the kids who sit in their classrooms.  There are no algorithms to prove that teachers do change the world. It’s not magic exactly, but it does defy science, at least for now.

So, for my middle school and high school English teachers, you may not have known it–hell, I didn’t even know it– but you did change my world.  I was listening even when I wasn’t; I fell in love with literature and writing because of you.  And now I am doing what you taught me to do: teaching.

The Amazing Race to the Top

Turns out that T.S. Eliot was right after all.  April is the cruelest month.

In classrooms across the country, teachers are sharpening those number two lead pencils, kids are supposedly getting a good night’s sleep and eating hearty breakfasts. Well, except for those kids who are too stressed to rest and for those who might go to bed hungry every night.  No one in power seems to think about peripheral issues like anxiety or poverty or how this constant cycle of testing affects kids.

Schools are revving their engines, in the fine tradition of quality reality television, ready to take off on The Amazing Race to the Top.

On your mark, get set…test and test and test some more.  Like the tributes in The Hunger Games, The Amazing Race to the Top features students competing on behalf of adults for government funding that will benefit their districts.

In NY state, meaningful instruction stops in grades 3-8 during April so that the Race can begin and testing and scoring can be completed.  Kids will furiously read, write, and compute. Odds are good that they won’t be learning much, but they sure will be working hard, reading, writing and computing.

Waiting at the finish line of The Amazing Race to the Top will be the state and federal pencil pushers congratulating themselves. More testing has certainly made for better schools. Winning districts will get checks.  Top finishing teachers who taught well to the tests will earn strong composite scores.

What will the kids, the competitors, get?

Anxiety. Self esteem issues. Fewer instructional days. More drills. Workbooks.

Testing can make kids sick.  But  the New York State Education Department reminds us that when children vomit on the tests, all paperwork should be packed up in secure zip lock bags and returned with all the other tests.

Testing can make kids hate school.  Testing can make kids hate each other, their teachers and themselves.

But testing makes for better instruction.  I don’t get it, but probably I was absent the day we covered this in grad school.

So get ready.  The Amazing Race to the Top is coming to a school near you.

So You Think You Can Teach?

“People think that because they like to cook, they should open their own place.”

Last night, the manager of a new restaurant in our neighborhood described the reality of that business: working fourteen hour days, seven days a week, creating ambiance, cultivating a loyal following, serving consistently good and varied food. “What people just don’t get is that you can’t wake up one day and suddenly be running a successful place.”

Yet from the outside, in a well-run establishment, in the hands of an experienced staff, it does seem effortless.  The pacing, the presentation, the meals all do appear to just happen.

As a teacher, I can relate.

Teachers hear this all the time.  Plenty of  people genuinely like their own kids and their kids’ friends. They can run an arts and crafts project at the dining room table.  They can read aloud and turn fractions into decimals.  They help their kids with homework. Some people even write. Therefore, they can certainly teach.

That’s because from the outside, in the hands of an experienced teacher, education also appears effortless. Inquisitive kids are working cooperatively, raising their hands, taking notes, asking questions.

But like the meal in a restaurant, it doesn’t just happen.

What outsiders don’t see are the hours teachers devote to planning.  It’s one thing to successfully deliver  a single day’s worth of reading, writing and arithmetic. But teachers must spin an intricate and continuous web of interconnected lessons that exist on a continuum of instruction. Today must flow organically into tomorrow and into next week, into next month. This demands content area expertise, foresight, intuition and flexibility. Teachers must create a master plan only to be ready to improvise at a moment’s notice when the inevitable interruptions arise.  This all requires vision that comes only from experience.

And don’t forget that part of planning is coming up with engaging lessons that provide content knowledge while simultaneously allowing for the challenge and wonder of discovery. It’s like finding the balance between just the right amount of salt and garlic and ruining a dish by over seasoning.

Then, once the instruction has been skillfully executed,  there is the time spent correcting student work.  And this isn’t simply circling misspelled words or finding incorrect calculations or pinpointing mixed up chronology, either. It’s about giving kids positive, fair feedback so that their next task will be that much better than the last.

Opening a restaurant is starting sound do-able to me now.  I am accustomed to long hours, hard work, and demanding consumers. People have told me my penne with olives and cherry tomatoes is restaurant quality. On second thought, I think I will just go back to Sergio’s and let the pros do their thing.

Recipe for a Good Teacher

Reblogged from theroommom:

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Teacher Appreciation Week is on the horizon at my daughter's school, which completely turns my idea brain into overdrive. We are implementing an idea I used during the nursery school years for the kindergarten teachers this year. We are organizing delivery of a week of freezable meals and a grocery store gift card.

E-mail the parents in the class with a list of suggested freezable dishes and ask for volunteers to deliver one item each day of the week.

Read more… 362 more words