Day 25: The Wrap Up- Did I Get It Done? #AprilBlogADay

Prompt: Wrapping Up The School Year- How will you know if you did what you needed to do this year?

I don't know if you are like me, but usually in early August, about 4 weeks before school starts, the ideas really begin to start flowing and developing.  All the things I want to do differently, to try, begin to take shape.  Last year I taught AP Lang for the first time.  I also had cancer last year.  The second half of my school year was a bit of a mess. I did everything I could to keep up with work and manage my own care and healing.  Being sick and being a teacher is perhaps the most difficult thing I have had to do. I had hoped that this year would be easier.  It was not.  I had surgery to help my paralyzed vocal cord in November and a week into my recovery I found out I had gallstones (as a result from weight loss surgery in November 2013).  You can read more about that journey here. 

The first 4 months of 2016 have been painful and exhausting.  I used all my self-treated days and had to go into my bank of days I have saved.  I know this is what they are for, but I have tremendous guilt about what I have not done this year.  I know there are students who were mad at me for missing so much work.  "If she doesn't care enough to be here...."  Things like that are heartbreaking.  There are few things more important to me than my teaching, my kids.  When my health and my body stopped me from being my best self, it made me angry and disappointed. I scrambled to try and revamp and work with my collaborating teachers to make sure things didn't get too far off track.  I put things into place in the last 6 weeks to ramp up.  The AP exam is May 11th.  We will know in July if the ramp up paid off.  For my 10th graders, we are going to begin writing prep for the global history regents exam in June.  I have a handful of 11th graders I will be working with to prep for retaking the ELA exam, also in June.  So it seems the best indicators are going to be test scores.  Did I, we...do what we needed to do this year.  I hope so.  Time will tell.             
 

Day 28: The Worst Advice We've Ever Heard About Technology in the classroom? #AprilBlogADay Challenge

Day 28...The Worst Advice We've Ever Heard About Technology in the classroom

It's just after 7 on day 28 and I have been thinking about this topic all day.  For the life of me, I could not think of any specific advice I had been given about using tech.  I am one who has embraced tech and often ends up teaching other teachers how to integrate themselves. 

At my current school, we have a computer science department (because we are a CS school) who for the most part are working on an entirely different level of tech than most of us.  I have great aspirations to let better at tech- at least learn some basics of coding so I can talk more with our students about what and how they are doing- but finding the time to sit down with Alice or some version of Scratch is overwhelming for this old lady.  Eric, graciously spent time with me on two occasions teaching me-or trying to teach me- how to use Doctopus but my brain just can't wrap itself around that one.  I do have my mainstays: Skedula (that has improved so much over the last 5 years) and I wish our school used more of it's features, but it's our online grade book.  I also use Teacher Dashboard, a lot.  It is on my top 5 digital teaching tools ever.

I guess for me, the prompt should really be: what misconceptions did you/do you have about tech in the classroom.  

Here are three:  

1.  All tools work for all teachers, because they are teaching tools.  

One of the most frustrating parts of EdTech- is that there are so many tools and administrators want to try new things, get on board with what will best help students move forward, support teacher development, and provide the all important data to support positive instructional outcomes.  I stand by this: do a few things really well.  REALLY WELL.  Not two dozen things half way or sort of.  I feel this way about lots of school related things.

2. Practice makes perfect.

We are not all excellent at everything.  I can be proficient, even ok- but who wants to be just ok?  I want to be HIGHLY EFFECTIVE.  There are been a few things over the years that I just couldn't figure out.  I don't push myself to master all the nuances (like with Excel) but I also don't have cause to use it very much because I teach English.  


3. More experienced (read: old) teachers can't learn new tricks.

It's all about what an individual clicks with- don't assume talent coaches.  


It's now almost 9.  Cooked and eaten dinner.  Still have a PPT to make for class tomorrow- thankful for this tech that will let me quickly, prep, save and get to go to bed.

Day 13: Leaders For Literacy Day! #AprilBlogADayChallenge

Prompt 13: Leaders for Literacy Day Challenge!
How is literacy critical to the advancement of society today?

It was 6:30 and I was still at school, like many of us, I’m sure.  Every other week I only have one class on Mondays- AP LANG which is always challenging and wonderful (well, most of the time).  I have learned more teaching this curriculum than I have since the boot camp of year one.  Despite only having one class today, I am always exhausted these Mondays and I am often at school late.  Andrew, who teaches AP Chem came in to check in re: test prep and time going into may.  We got onto talking about books and I was relaying a conversation I had with my husband about why he disliked the Game of Thrones series (he knows he is not the norm) after Andrew expressed that he had not liked them.  We moved fluidly from idea to idea, talking about literature, authors, genre. Then I told him about today’s April Blog A Day Challenge.  “This is what my blog post is going to be about…”  

I have never heard my students have a conversation about books the way Andrew and I just had.  Working in a CS school, I hear conversations about video games, which in their own right often have complicated and nuanced story lines, characters and each fall into genre of their own.  Does this mean that the reading of books is disappearing?  Can students cultivate literacy in new ways- like through classes like video game design-or do we need to foster literacy skills the way most of us built them- by reading books? 

I don’t think that video games are a substitution for reading.  In AP Lang the majority of the reading students do is nonfiction.  I made the choice, as I developed my curriculum to anchor each of the 4 units in a novel that is connected to a larger theme in the context of rhetoric. Our current unit is Language and Community and our anchor text is the perennial favorite, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.  Today was the first day of a three day sequence and preparation and participation in Socratic Seminar.  I had spent the weekend creating a multitude of documents for students to use and to help them prepare for the two rounds of discussion they will each have to participate in on Wednesday and Thursday this week.  It’s essentially fancy Book Club for anyone not familiar with the discussion.  It works and it works well.  I am by no means an expert but I think it provides students to demonstrate mastery of a plethora of skills in a compact package.  The directions for the prep today were as follows:

1.  You will have 2 rounds today, in small groups to break down your assigned questions and then discuss informally, look for evidence and begin to collect evidence in your SocSem planning doc I put in your Google Drive.

2.  The first round will be in groups of 4 (there should be 8) and we will all be discussing Question 1

3.  The second round you will be in groups of 5-6 to discuss your second question.  There should be 6 groups, 2 for each question.

As I circulated around, listening in on conversations, I could not help but think, THIS is when the real learning happens. I could see it: ideas flowing, uncensored, unafraid of making mistakes, to be right or wrong, to challenge thinking and to BE CHALLENGED.  I sat down with a group discussing the evolution of the protagonist through the course of the novel.  It was fantastic.  They brought up great points that I had not ever thought about despite having read TEWWG a dozen or so times.  Fresh eyes brings new perspective, especially important for educators: we don’t know it all. I found myself getting excited about the discussion and stayed longer than I should have, caught up in the exchange and listening to the learning happening.  THIS is literacy at work.

When my students come into class on Wednesday, some of them will be nervous, they will feel the pressure of a grade and having to answer to a parent.  They may not have prepared enough, found enough evidence, been sure enough.  What they don’t know is that you can never be sure enough.  Life, knowledge and understanding is fluid and there is always something new to change what we may have been sure of just a few weeks earlier.

It’s now 7:30.  I am typing away on the R train and I am ready to be home.  This is what I know:  the real power of literacy is having the ability to read in the first place.  I am grateful that all my students can read.  They have this cultural collateral that will help gain them admission to great colleges, it will help them apply to amazing jobs after they graduate and it will help them in those moments when they are at work later than they planned and got to have a lovely conversation with a colleague about books.

Post 11: Reading??? #AprilBlogADay Challenge

Prompt 11: What are you reading? Professionally or Personally? And if you aren't reading right now, why?

Growing up I loved reading serials- The Baby Sitters Club by Ann M. Martin, in high school I discovered Armistead Maupin's Tales of The City.  There were novels I enjoyed too: Pigs in Heaven and Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver and Their Eyes Were Watching God by ZN Hurston and A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (which I struggled through but went to the library and listened to all 18 hours on cassette tape and cried at the end).  I know that reading these books growing up had a huge impact on my thinking on narrative and telling stories.  

As I have gotten older, the more I come to terms with the fact that I am not the best reader. I know all the propaganda we teachers use: good readers make better writers.  The more you read the more exposed you will be to big ideas that guide and challenge global leaders and historical events. I don't disagree. I read, but most of the reading I do is sporadic and/or for pleasure (I love romance novels). I have been very honest with students (in AP) this year about knowing one's strengths and when one is is not as strong at something how we develop the skills to push through: the cultural collateral of the cannon. Meaning- I learned to read but didn't really enjoy it until college.  It was in graduate school where I finally came to understand, through  Maureen Barbieri (at NYU) and the works of Nancy Atwell, that when readers select what they read, and are given permission to put a book down if they don't like it, they will own their reading and have great success.  In my teaching career I have never been able to teach a course where students get to read for pleasure.  My favorite English class was in 10th grade, when my teacher, Ms. Van Zwol, designed a course where we were able to select the novels we read.  They had to fall into specific categories and had to be approved.  We also had to do culminating writing at the end of each novel.  I remember more from that year than almost any other.  The power of choice (and of fiction) is something missing from HS ELA today. 

All that said, while I have a pile of books waiting to be read (The Martian by Andy Weir is at the top followed by the first book in the Outlander series.) I do love to write and I know that is my strength.  It always has been but I push myself to read because the love the feeling of finishing a book, seeing the journey and how a book feels in my hand.