Bless Me Ultima Glogster

I LOVE GLOGSTER

http://christinm.glogster.com/bless-me-ultima/

The Senior Project...

So I know there's been a lot of discussion at the school, district and classroom level about the senior project, but for me, it's about to get worse.

My district is proposing tabling the SP for 2 years due to budget concerns and because they can't afford to keep people in the position of grad project coordinator when they need teachers in the classroom. Of course, I don't have a coordinator--I AM the coordinator.

So, here's the problem: My school (A PLC) requires a graduation project apart from the county standards. It's part of the model of our school. However, if none of the other schools require it and we do, we won't be getting or keeping students and we won't be graduating anyone. (That's the whole point of our school--to increase graduation rates)

Anyway, I've already had calls from parents (whose kids aren't doing well in the project this semester) saying that it's not fair and blah blah blah. I'm already frustrated and realizing that I'm going to have to revamp my entire curriculum over the summer.

My biggest frustration is, that while I'm not a fan of all aspects of the grad project, it certainly provides a level of preparation that students would not have been forced to encounter prior. I plan on implementing a senior English paper, which is pretty standard I think, and perhaps a service learning project.

More on Poetry Out Loud!

Heather asked in a comment about how G did at the state competition...so here's the update:

I want to start by saying that I could not be more proud of my student. The other competitors were excellent and the pressure was certainly there. He did not move on to the final round, but he did a great job and can be personally proud of his performance.

My husband accompanied me to Raleigh, where the event was held at the NC History Museum. It was so well done! They really did a fantastic job of not only hosting, but educating the students and audience and making the students feel at ease. There were sound checks and practice times and time to relax and focus. My husband isn't a literary person really, and he enjoyed every moment of the event. It was really a fun time.

And the students were phenomenal! I was so impressed with each one.

As for my worry that I was not preparing G properly-- well--I'm not so worried about that anymore. He was right where he needed to be and he hopes to compete again next year!

It was painful when G found out that he was not moving on. I could see his face, which I now know so well and I could see his disappointment. But on the following Monday, when he came to school, an amazing thing occurred...G came to school wearing his dress shoes, pants, shirt and tie (that we had helped him pick out with the assistance of his mother) and his certificate in hand and showed all the students his achievement. Here I was worried that he would be upset or depressed! He was proud of himself! I breathed a sigh of relief and we posed for a picture together. A great end to this year's POL!

When life gets in the way...

This week, I have to practice what I preach. My students are the kind of students who have had trouble in school when "life gets in the way." Every day I encourage them to reach their goals and not give up--keep plugging through "Macbeth" or whatever they may be working on.

This week, I will have to lead by example. My life is getting in the way of all of my obligations. My Gram is dying and I spent most of spring break with her. The funeral could be any time now and the pressure and grief is mounting.

But...I still have senior papers to review, I still have a parent to meet with today during planning, I still have to give G his assignments for "A Raisin in the Sun." And, most of all, I have to prepare to be gone at any time. And this is where I have to trust that I have taught my students how to continue even without my guidance at every turn. Isn't that what I really want for them afterall? I want them to be able to guide themselves, turn to each other as resources and follow the plans I have left for them. That is what self-pace, non-traditional education is all about.

But for now, I try to remain present, remain their teacher during the hours I am here and push them like there's no tomorrow!!!

"This is Just to Say"

I am very partial to the poetry of William Carlos Williams. Particularly the poem "This is Just to Say." Last week, I was working on a poetry writing unit with my three Creative Writing Students and I asked them to find three poems each: 1 that "sang" to them, 1 that they just liked and 1 that they really hated. For each of those poems, they were to write a 1/2 to 1 page (double spaced) response and address certain questions I provided or respond freely. Then, we all sat at a table together, read our poems and talked about like, dislike, hate, love...

I was by far one of the most eye opening experiences of my life. One of my students wrote about his love for the poem "I am the People, the Mob" by Carl Sandburg. I don't have what he wrote in front of me, but it literally brought me to tears. I had NEVER thought about the poem in the way that he made me think about it.

Well, back to Williams...as it turns out one of my students dislikes his poetry for the exact reasons I love it: the choppy lines, the super short poems, the simple settings and singular focus etc. And the student asked me why I liked poetry that "wasn't really like a poem." Wasn't that a great opportunity to discuss what makes a poem a poem? This is the joy of my teaching experience. I adore the opportunity to share what I love, be impressed by the thoughts of my brilliant students and open their minds to new ideas. I'm teaching and learning and thinking and doing and living all in one. Education is not just well designed lesson plans and well organized classrooms--it's about engaging students and sharing the passion for language and learning.

Somedays, I love my life.

The time flies and the exhaustion sets in...

I cannot believe that it is March 23. I cannot believe that I still have so much to do with my students. I cannot believe that some of them, particularly seniors, do not realize that time is running out.

I have 21 seniors this semester. The first rough draft of their research papers were due last friday and 12 of them didn't turn it in. Not only did they not turn the rough draft in, they didn't tell me why it wasn't done or even speak to me about it until I approached them.

I am left feeling very frustrated. Didn't we go over the process? Didn't I guide them to find good sources and learn to take notes and write an outline and blah blah blah...? Haven't I worked one on one with most of them to answer difficult questions, learn more about their topics and read articles/books/journals with them? What haven't I done? Oh yeah...I didn't write the paper for them. LOL How silly of me not to have realized that I would need to do that. (sarcasm)

I have to say though, that the papers I did get turned in weren't bad. Attempts were made at integrating quotations and incorporating sources like we had worked on. MLA citations were hit or miss, but they could show me that they were trying. Some students even came to the realization on their own that the voice of their paper wasn't correct. So, I guess there are some moments when it looks like there's really a teacher, teaching.

This process is exhausting for me. I become deeply invested in each of my students and I simply do not have enough time.

Getting ready to attack a new week

I have a student who is going to compete at the state Poetry Out Loud competition on March 6th! www.poetryoutloud.org

I am his English 3 and Creative Writing teacher as well as his POL coach. I am really feeling the pressure of this responsibility. The first difficulty I faced was in helping him to select his three poems for memorization. I wanted him to not only meet the guidelines of the competition, but select poems that could serve him best.

Preparing for this event has lead me to reflect heavily on my relationship with this student. G is an amazing kid, but he has various issues to overcome. One, he has disgraphia. Luckily, we have a computer for every student in every classroom, so this is not a huge issue. Two, he is highly gifted in almost every academic area that I am aware of. Three, he is unarguably odd. This student reminds me a great deal of my younger brother who is a genius and also has disgraphia and is very odd. I believe there are mental health issue as well, but I am not privy to what they are. The world is not an easy place for kids like this.

But anyway, like I was saying, POL is helping me to reflect on my relationship with this student. I have taught him for English 1, 2 and now 3 and Creative Writing. I will have him for English 4 next year. Essentially, I will be his only English teacher for his entire high school career. I remember the first day I met G--it was the open house for the 2208-2009 school year and I had NO idea what I was doing yet. I was still reviewing other English teacher's pacing guides and trying to decide what I was doing. Around the second week of our time together in English 1, I began to notice that G did not use any punctuation. NONE! I asked other teachers about this and was told that he was LD etc. I read G's writing, studied his lack of punctuation and one day, decided to sit down and talk to him about it.

"I've noticed you don't use punctuation in your writing." That's all I said. He looked at me. "I know you don't think it's important, but you're going to have to use it." Ok, so I didn't really know why he didn't use punctuation, but I guess this was my instinct talking. "Yes," he said "I really don't see the point." And that was the beginning of G and I really working together. It's been quite an interesting 2 years.

I have really enjoyed watching this student grow. I will be working with him very intensively over the next 2 weeks to prepare for POL. It will be, I'm sure, something I will remember fondly. I'm so glad I'm past the crying part of being an English teacher!

I will not begin this story of me telling you about my traumatic birth, nor my relatively unexciting childhood as the oldest of three children growing up in a fairly unusual family. I will not tell you about being poor or eating only whole wheat bread and never having had a Twinkie until I was fifteen years old. I won’t tell you about these things because it makes me sound old, deprived and relatively depressing. Instead, I will try to paint an accurate picture of my life for you, the reader.
I was born. It was traumatic. It was the end of the 70’s and my parents were too young and too stupid to know that having me would change the course of their lives individually and together. My mother describes the look I gave the camera in the first hospital picture taken of me as “baby with an attitude.” This is probably a good way to sum up my childhood, for I had an attitude from the beginning. I think this is because I was alive and I wanted to world to wake up and realize it.
As a child growing up in the city of and the suburbs around Chicago I was pretty “free wheeling.” As in, I was a loose cannon with a quick temper and an even sassier mouth. “I didn’t ask to be born!” was one of my favorite sayings to scream at my parents as I slammed my bedroom door. “Dear ex-mother” was also the way I enjoyed starting hate letters I sent via paper airplane down the stairs. I was writing though…wasn’t I?
How in the world did I get from all that to this place? I think I got here because of my determination NOT to. My mom was an English major and would have been a high school English teacher if she hadn’t had me and my dad hadn’t had the brilliant idea to homeschool us kids. It wasn’t until much later in my life that I actually admired my mom, what she did for us, how well-educated she was and how she contributed to who I am today. No, in fact, I didn’t want to be anything like Mom, so I decided not to embrace my obvious love (reading and writing) and go for something completely different.
As far as teaching goes, I didn’t really like teachers. “Teachers” were the people who told me that something was wrong with me because I didn’t go to school. They told me I would be an unsocialzed lump and turn out with horns growing out of my head. Or worse, NO FRIENDS. Teachers were truly my enemy. I never wanted to be that.
So, I wound up in North Carolina wondering how I got here and I started going to UNCC in 1998 for History and Anthropology. NOT TEACHING! “What are you going to do with those majors?” everyone asked. I really didn’t know. Nor did I care. Honestly, I did not care. I was following my passion at the time and that’s all that mattered to me.
Several years later after trauma, depression, homelessness, my parent’s violent divorce and a marriage of my own I finished what I began. And then…nothing. I didn’t do a damn thing with it. I was lost.
So yeah, I embraced my love of dogs, something my dad had denied me, and began training and rehabilitating dogs full time under the instruction of a very talented woman who saw my gifts like my own mother had seen them. I was good at the teaching part. Yes, I was good at the dog part too, but I was really good at finding ways to teach the same information to so many different people. I had classes with children, teens, the elderly, old, cold and stony men, women who cried and told me the stories of their broken relationships—People!
I then came up with this fantastic idea to go back to school, get my English degree, bring up my GPA and become what? An English teacher! In the fall of 2006 I went back to school and completely immersed myself in the English curriculum. I was there for two glorious semesters reading, writing and discovering how I should have studied English the first time I was in college. However, I think it was good for me to have gone this route. I have so much more experience in the world to draw on. I have been through some very difficult times in my life and can relate to students who have trauma, bad family situations and feel overwhelmed.
I was very successful in school the second time around. I let go of the shame of my bad GPA from the first time and realized that it was really a result of my life, not my abilities. I made the chancellor’s list both semesters I was back in college and I really felt good about myself. I felt like I would get hired by some high school and I would be successful teaching a subject I loved and felt confident about.
I think my first day in the classroom was the closest I’ve ever been to true panic. I felt so lost and alone even at the age of 28. I was so glad I had not started teaching at 22 or 23…they would have eaten me alive. My students had problems I could not imagine and family situations I could not comprehend. I taught seriously at-risk students who had previously failed English 1. They were blank-faced, disrespectful, disenfranchised, and scared. They didn’t seem to like me, school or what I had to teach. Some of them barely spoke enough English to be in a regular classroom and I was overwhelmed by the task ahead of me. I cried every day. I sobbed on weekend. I told my husband I couldn’t do it—I couldn’t face another day. But every day I got up, got myself together and went to school to face all of them and their problems and tell them I cared enough to fight for them.
I had no support at my first school. I was literally hung out to dry and people whispered behind my back about my impending failure. “Maybe you’ll get a real class with real students—someday” they’d say. It was the most depressing thing I’d ever heard. Someone said that because my students had failed, they weren’t REAL.