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!
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
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.
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.
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