Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout the new sound. Funny, but it’s still rock ‘n roll to me.

Man, I have a lot coming up this week.  I’m glad I planned ahead.

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

What do you mean, I shouldn’t have done that?

“It’s not effective.”

What’s the matter with planning ahead?

“Can’t you tell that you’re not paying attention to your students’ needs?”

So should I poll every one of them at the beginning of class to make sure that the lesson that we only have 45 minutes for is customized to all 25 of them?

“Welcome to the age of innovation.  Honestly, where have you been?  You can’t be expected to be a good teacher if you don’t put all of your time and effort into using innovative technology to give your students forward-thinking, out-of-the-box classroom experiences that are authentic.”

Hm. Everybody talks about innovation but I kind of see the same stuff I’ve always seen.  I mean, half the stuff I have seen that’s all flashy and new is all stuff I can do with a piece of chalk and some discussion in my class.

“Oh, don’t get me started about your classroom.”

What’s the matter with the classroom?

“Can’t you tell that you are clinging to an outdated industrial factory-model mode of teaching that is designed to enslave students in order to create nothing but compliance to a standardized test-based regime?”

Uh, should I get more bean bags or something?

“Look, just get rid of the outdated rows and make sure that none of your students are facing you but are grouped so they can always be interacting with one another in order to minimize your presence in the room.”

Yeah, everybody talks about the fact that students don’t need teachers because they can learn on their own, but it seems that I’m still held responsible when they don’t.

But then again, that’s “everybody” and when has “everybody” been right?  Listening to people on Twitter is the same conversation we’ve always had:  there’s some new method, but simply reading a book or an article won’t give you the full impact or effect because the people teaching teachers don’t know anything about being teachers.  Although they seem to be too aimed at pontificating toward teachers.

So maybe what you’re saying is that I should throw out my furniture, give everyone an iPad and leave the classroom altogether?

“You know, you could really be an Innovative Educator if you just give it half a chance.  And don’t waste your money on 1:1.  You’ll get more out of BYOD.”

1:1, BYOD, authentic assessment, innovative, out of the box … is teaching part of this?  I mean, people I work this were around way before that stuff.

“Yes, but they’re wrong.”

What’s the matter with my colleagues?

“Don’t you know that they’re out of touch.”

So I should simply go ahead and try to be the most knowledgeable and up-front person in my department?

“Well, you know that teachers don’t have a monopoly on knowledge.  Don’t you know that all you are there to do is be a guide on the side?”

Maybe I should just stop listening to you so I can clear my head, get my confidence back, and go ahead … and teach.

 

 

The case for and against English textbooks

Based on the plans that I was writing out yesterday for the next quarter (yes, I know that this doesn’t make me an “innovative educator,” but I tend to plan the elements of my course in advance), I realized that I can come in to work on Monday and tell my advanced class that they can bring in their textbooks and sign them back in.

Sounds kind of a mundane set of instructions, right?  But let’s keep in mind that it’s the end of January.  We are barely into the second semester of the school year and the “bring in your textbooks and sign them back in” announcement is what you often hear in May.  But as I have been sketching out plans for the third and fourth quarters, I’ve noticed that I’m simply not going to need the English textbook for the remainder of the year.  So why have it at home?

English textbooks have always perplexed me.  While I know I shouldn’t make the mistake of comparing my current students’ experience with my own, I can’t help but think back and remember what I actually did in my own high school English classes.  Now, I’d had “reading books” when I was in elementary school–in fact, I wrote a whole post about them on my other blog back in 2011–and they had vocabulary and grammar worksheets that went along with them, and I remember actually having an “English” text in junior high, but I don’t remember using it for more than grammar exercises.  When I got to high school, though, there wasn’t a set of textbooks that I remember filling out forms for every year, unless you counted the Sadlier-Oxford vocabulary books we used from ninth to eleventh grade.

No, English when I was in high school was simply novels and plays, starting with Great Expectations with Mr. Valenti freshman year and ending with Ordinary People senior year (which may or may not be true.  I remember that Great Expectations was the very first book I read in high school, but my mind’s cloudy on the last one).  My teachers would hand out the book along with the Sayville High School “book loan card” that we filled out and were kept on file, and we’d be told that we had to read part of the book or the entire book by a certain date.

That’s kind of how I work things with my advanced sophomores.  I give out a copy of whatever we’re reading as well as a schedule of when we’re discussing what (as much as I can, anyway) and reiterate my expectation that they come to class prepared each day.   Most of the material, however, isn’t from our textbook and instead comes via individual copies of novels or plays, or things I have found in various anthologies or from websites that I have photocopied.  The textbook does come into play for a random poem or story here and there, and all of my sophomores read Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which can be found there, but beyond that I have to ask: why is the book there?

Okay, I know why it’s there or at least how it got there.  Years before I started teaching at my current high school, there was a textbook adoption process and whomever was in charge at the time chose the McDougal Littel text, with all of its ancillary exercise books and test prep materials.  In another district I once taught in, the winning company was Pearson-Prentice Hall.  And while those ancillary exercise books have been great for stuff like sub work, I can’t say that it would make a difference in my work.

So do we even need textbooks in English class?

Don’t be scared, it’s only The Bard.

“So what is it about Shakespeare that you hate so much?”  I asked.

The class laughed and I added, “No, really.  I tell students we’re reading Shakespeare and they act like I was going to perform invasive surgery?  What is it?”

I was cheating a little with this question, mainly because I knew the answer and one of my students told me exactly what I was waiting to hear:  ”It’s Romeo & Juliet.”

We then talked a little about that particular play, even though that’s not what we’re reading, and I told them that I felt for them because I really can’t stand that play either and that I think that Romeo edges out Holden Caulfield as the whiniest teenage boy in literature.  But I didn’t spend too long on it because I hadn’t come to bury Romeo nor praise him; on the contrary, our objective for the day was to go over the background on the play that we’ll be discussing next week, which is Twelfth Night.

I had first taught the play last year and while my class had found it a little difficult to follow, I felt it was a good experience, especially for an advanced class that was going to be moving on to AP English.  But I will admit I was a little frustrated by how much they didn’t “get” out of the play because I find it to be an engaging and even funny comedy–and I’m not even a Shakespeare buff (they’ll revoke my teaching license for this, but I’ve never read Hamlet).  Still, you can’t always expect even the most advanced of students to completely “get” all of the nuance in The Bard’s writing.

So when it came time to do the introduction day for the unit, I decided to directly address the issues my students had last year with the hopes that I could head them off with this year’s group.  I posted different resources on the board about two weeks out–SparkNotes’ “No Fear Shakespeare” and the “Shakespeare Appreciated” version of Twelfth Night offered by Audible.com are two I have found very useful (although I did mention that you have to buy the audiobook).  I talked to one of my fellow English teachers, who also runs the theater program and he gave me some resources for getting past the language barrier.  And I asked a student from last year’s class–who happens to be in my study hall–to be in class the day I did the introduction lesson for a little Q&A.

I wasn’t sure how that last part would go over so I began with a pretty run-of-the-mill PowerPoint with some basic facts about Shakespeare’s life at the time Twelfth Night was written and performed, the historical context of Elizabethan England, and some of the themes and motifs they should explore as they read and discuss the play.  But then I began the intended Q&A, which I started as an “interview” where I simply asked her about how she came to know Shakespeare and why she liked the play and how she approached studying the play as well as how she approached her assignments for the play–one of which was leading the class discussion on Act I.

She has a very vibrant personality and little to no reluctance to speaking in front of students–plus, we’d done some prep in study hall the day before–so the conversation between the two of us flowed pretty easily and the class joined in at points as well.  In fact, when I brought up the fact that so many students are reluctant to read Shakespeare, it was one of my students (“the audience”) who mentioned that Romeo & Juliet has the ability to kill any potential love of The Bard … though I did have one student who really liked the play (and in all honesty, it’s not a terrible play.  I just don’t like it).

So did it work?  I’m not sure–we don’t start discussing the play until Tuesday.  Did I think it was worth it?  Well, let me put it this way:  there is so much talk about getting “experts” into classes to talk about subjects that when you are trying to basically assuage fears about an upcoming assignment, I thought bringing in someone who has already been there to in the very least give a pep talk would be a good idea.  I mean, I’m sure that I could have told them why Shakespeare is not intimidating and give them tips for tackling the language as well as not losing track of all the characters and events, but to hear it from another student?  Well, I’m hoping that made more of an impact.

Teachers of Habit

Photo by Graela. Used under cc license.

When I was taking career switcher classes to get my teaching license, I often had teachers who would talk about how school isn’t the way it was when I was a kid.  I’m in my eighth year now and I’m still hearing that, especially from people in the edublogosphere (is that a word?).  Stop me if you’ve heard it: the days of desks in rows and everyone listening to the teacher lecture are over; you need to be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage; the teacher who does the same thing the same way every year is a bad teacher.

To a certain extent, I guess those people are right (although I swear they post or tweet such things so they’ll get mentions or retweets).  If you are the exact same thing year in and year out it might be a sign of being stuck in a rut and you don’t want to do that.  You do want to make sure you are reaching your students, especially as you get older and the generation gets wider.

On the other hand, some of the best people to give me advice during my first year and over the past seven years of my teaching career were veterans; the same veterans that I’d been warned were sort of destroying the young minds they were supposed to enrich.  Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but really … I found that all of the great advice came from people who supposedly fit a stereotype of a “bad” teacher.

One such piece of advice that I’ve always taken to heart was the idea of finding my rhythm.  One department chair I had said, “Just make it through your first year and don’t try to overdo it.”  Another department chair I had said, “Find your center.”  I took this to mean that I should learn what works right for me and not always try to overreach and burn myself out, especially considering that there are 180 days in a school year and trying to do something amazing each day would probably kill me if I wasn’t careful.  That didn’t mean find one thing and always do that and never change; it simply meant … well, cultivate my style.

I thought of this today while in my advanced English class.  I was telling them how much I enjoyed yesterday’s discussion and how it was much better than what I had done last year, mainly because I’d listened to a few students who suggested some changes that I could make.  Then, I had them do a quick activity where they actually planned lessons (well, sketched them out) as if they were going to be teaching 9/11 and took a moment to reflect on what they got out of the last five or so days in class.  A few students commented that they had actually gone online these last few days and read some more and watched some videos on YouTube and really felt they knew more about it.  And I won’t lie, it made me feel good, not just because they learned something but because suggestions I had taken from a previous year’s class and then implemented turned out to be a good idea.

Contrast that with my general-level classes, who are reading Act I of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.  I’ve taught this play for five years in a row and I actually tend to teach it the same way every time.  My collaborating teacher and I have students read the parts, we read the stage directions, and we stop from time to time to answer questions on the study guides.  It sounds like it could have been done 20 or 30 years ago in the same way, and I suppose it could have, but it always seems to work really well.  When we talk about the characters and the events, there’s not a lot of dead silence and students actually have responses, and even though some of the reading is the typical flat-toned reading of a high school student, I usually get volunteers for parts and people are genuninely concerned with what’s going to happen.

So in one case, adjustments being made; in another case, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

No one is to blame … oh wait, I am

image by John Ragai. Used under creative commons license.

So earlier this week, one of the clubs in my school messed something up.  It wasn’t a horrible mistake or anything and I don’t really want to get into the specifics, but it was one of those types of mistakes that was easily visible and could have been easily prevented.  As is with all mistakes of this type, the “Oh what a shame” conversations began among my fellow faculty members and at one point, I heard someone ask, “Who’s responsible?”

“Well,” I told that person, “the students are responsible but the adviser is going to get blamed.”

Yes, it was a snide remark, as I am a tight ball of stress during the last two weeks of school because the yearbook comes out and I live in constant fear of both not being able to pay the bill to the publisher and the angry parent phone call, but there’s also some truth in it as well.  Whenever something that is supposed to be student-led or student-centered goes wrong, it seems that someone is going to the teacher or adviser and asking them, “How could you let this happen?”  Heck, sometimes it’s even worse and there are people in the principal’s office, at school board meetings, and in the local media calling for the teacher in question to be fired.

I bring this up not to complain that as an activities adviser I am held accountable for the actions of my students (as a professional, I know the meaning of the word “accountability”), but because I have read a number of blog posts and sat in on a number of chats on Twitter lately where the discussion about the role of teachers has been about how our role is evolving and the notion of a “teacher” is probably obsolete.  Some people go as far as to talk about how the notion of school is obsolete.  Stop me if you’ve heard these before:

• You are no longer the sage on the stage.  Be the guide on the side.
• Teachers shouldn’t think of themselves as teachers, but as coaches or mentors
• We are in a post-industrial society and no longer training children to work in factories
• Students should not be grouped by date of manufacture and be forced to learn what they don’t want to
• School should connect to real life and audiences should be authentic

Now, these are all nifty catchphrases and buzzy words, but forgive me if I tend to be a bit of a skeptic when I hear them (especially from the mouth of someone paid more than what I make in one month to come and talk to my faculty for one day), especially any of them that suggest that the job that I am doing is somehow irrelevant (Yes, I get defensive.  You would too if you were told that you’re useless).  But I’m not stubborn enough to think that my role doesn’t have to evolve with the times.  I definitely like the idea of my students producing work for an audience that goes beyond the classroom or the school (though as I’ve said before, I take issue with my being considered not “authentic” enough of an audience), which is why I have enjoyed working on yearbooks and student newspapers.

But I have to wonder, if the student work isn’t very good or if there is something wrong about it that upsets someone, does it have to be just me that’s called on the carpet?

In my seven years as a yearbook adviser, I have had both ends of the spectrum when it comes to staffs–staffs who worked so well together that I truly felt like an adviser, and staffs who did so little of their own work that I can point to every page of that yearbook and tell you what I did to make it look good.  With the latter type of staff, I found myself doing an enormous amount of work because I have an aversion to things with my name on them looking like crap.  Call it egotistical, but it’s the truth.  And I know that if I had put that aside and allowed things to look like crap, I would have been more or less found “responsible” for that crappiness even though I didn’t actually do the work.

There’s a point in here and I’ll get to it because it’s 8:00 on a Saturday morning and I have to get my son ready for a tee ball game.  If we are going to encourage student-centered work that’s meant for an “authentic” audience (seriously), is it still our job to shield them from the negativity that exists when that authentic audience finds it sub-par or even offensive?  Say a student posts a class project to YouTube and a parent in the district gets upset that “this is what is being produced in our classrooms?!?!” and goes to the school board.  Should I put that student on the phone with the angry parent or bring him to the meeting with the principal or put him up in front of the school board or is it still my job to take the bullet?  I’m not against the idea of continuing to take that bullet–after all, I am professional–but I wonder if the rhetoric that I bullet-pointed at the beginning of this post doesn’t set us up for a double standard, especially when our culture (that “real life” “authentic” audience) doesn’t know the ins and outs and nuances of education.

If it happened long ago and far away, can’t it still be relevant to them today?

In recent days, I’ve read a number of posts on various blogs that address a common talking point these days, which is the idea that we need to remember that students are the center of education.  In some places, the writers were simply reinforcing the idea of student-centered learning and better student engagement, something that I, along with quite a number of my colleagues strive for (and admittedly struggle with from time to time).  But in others, there was this underlying tone that it’s not just that students are the center of learning in the classroom, but almost that they’re the center of the universe in some way.  Said one person about cell phones: “If you can’t hold their attention in competition with a cell, that’s not their problem.”  Said another: Attention is the new currency in our world and you need to offer something in exchange if you want me to listen to you.”

My reflexive response to this (i.e., my getting defensive … and come on, we all do it) is, “So, do I have this teaching license for your entertainment? I didn’t realize that I need to be singing and dancing.  I know, I’ll add more fart jokes to tomorrow’s lesson.”  But that’s not much of a constructive response, to be honest and no matter how bratty the insistence that I keep my students’ attention as if I am some sort of entertainer, there is a kernel of truth to it.  If it weren’t true and I did not have to keep them attentive and engaged, I wouldn’t have to see the words “relevant” and “authentic” in every post I read.  In other words, what does it matter to a student if the material that I am covering is not important to their everyday lives, or who they are, or isn’t something they can use right away (via social media, of course)?  And mind you, I take all of these things into account when planning units and lessons.  I, just like so many of us, want my students to leave the class feeling that they’ve grown in some way or learned something.  I thought of that when I was planning the unit that I’ve just started teaching.

The only problem is that we’re reading Night, and that’s about something that happened half a century before they were born.

I’m not being flip here.  I’ve been bothered by this ever since I picked up the book to revise the unit again this year, for a few reasons.  First, I chose the book and therefore I’ve already made my unit teacher-centered because I am not letting my students take control of their own learning and letting them read what they want.  Second, I’ll be spending time on an event that happened long ago in a country whose government no longer exists and will more than likely never exist again (a government we defeated, btw).  And third, we live in a free society where that couldn’t possibly happen, so how it possibly be relevant to them?

Some of the answers to that are obvious: we learn about The Holocaust so it can’t happen again.  We need to make sure we continue to fight intolerance and hatred.  We need to understand the horrors that humanity is capable of.  But again, I hear that voice that demands authenticity and tells me that I’m wrong for foisting this upon them because it’s not relevant unless they decide it is.

Now, in three years of teaching Night, I have always had students who latch onto the book and devour it, probably because they have an interest in World War II history or they have grandparents or great-grandparents who fought in the war, much like I did (my paternal grandfather was a turret gunner on a bomber), and while The Holocaust happened a while ago, it is still fresh enough in our society’s mind for students to know how important it is.  But what happens as the decades go by and survivors pass and it becomes not a memory but a watered-down recount in a bad textbook that’s been whitewashed by Pearson because the Texas Board of Education says so?  And how do you keep the murder of six million European Jews relevant to a predominantly white Christian population that might shrug it off and say “Eh, it can’t happen to me?”

Here’s where I will sound like a teacher-centered teacher, and I’ll try not to sound too pompous, but this is one of those subjects that I feel that whether in history or English class we need to always teach because even if students themselves don’t think it’s relevant, it is and we need to show that it is.  We haven’t started the actual book yet; instead, we’ve talked about antisemitism, the rise of the Nazi party to power, and propaganda so that not only do we talk about what happened but why and how it was capable of happening on such a large scale.  Because when you really think about it, the scale of The Holocaust is astounding and even mind-boggling, something that you don’t really understand until you look at a map and see the entire system stretched over several countries.

But again, that voice … “So what?  It won’t happen here.  It won’t happen to me.  It’s not relevant.”

Because it’s not hard to make Night or The Holocaust engaging, but making sure that we don’t forget why it is always going to be important and relevant is going to continue to be the challenge, and as self-righteous as it sounds, it’s one I think we should all accept, no matter how teacher-centered that seems.

Whatever happened to the microcosm?

I hear the word “authentic” a lot lately, usually in the context of the learning experience. The way the word is applied to learning seems to be in order to make a point that the “real world” is the ultimate classroom. Usually, such a point is followed by another that uses the words “factory-model learning” in reference to a public school classroom. In other words “authentic” simply seems to be another word added to a growing stack of words and talking points trying to invalidate both the classroom model and public schools as a whole.

Frankly, I think this, as a talking point, has been so overused that it’s worn out and is almost a cliché. There’s some validity to the argument, of course, but it seems that those who employ it are more interested in making noise than anything else. I don’t think any classroom teacher will deny that learning can take place outside of a classroom, and I don’t know any classroom teacher who thinks that he or she has a monopoly on learning. If anything, I know many teachers who enjoy it when their students bring new things to the table and are frustrated that more of their students don’t realize that learning does not happen in a vacuum. In fact, there’s a strong argument to be made for more learning happening outside of a classroom than inside of it. What I question is why the pendulum has swung all the way to where a classroom is not “authentic.”

When I was in school–and yes, I know that sounds very, “Hey, kids, get off my lawn!”–I heard teachers use the word “microcosm” quite a bit. Now, it was often used in the tired old context of “School is your job!”, but I did start to wonder lately if the idea of school as a microcosm for the world still held any weight. I know the world has changed quite a bit since I walked the halls of my alma mater (go Flashes!) but now that I have experience in the working world–both in and out of public education–I see how some of the rules and tenets I grew up with still apply.

So, since lists are fun, here are five (with the disclaimer that I teach high school, so while you might be able to apply some of this to elementary/middle school, I in no way believe that one size fits all) …

It’s okay.

I’m not Catholic (even though I have a B.A. from a Jesuit college — GO HOUNDS!  BEAT OHIO STATE!), but there are some days when one of my favorite Great Big Sea lyrics is terribly applicable:  ”I could really use to lose my Catholic conscience, ’cause I’m getting sick of feeling guilty all the time.”

Today was one of those days.  Because today I committed what is definitely one of the seven deadly sins of education.  I did something that no 21st Century teacher should do.  I did something that would make an “Innovative Educator” recoil in horror and weep from the knowledge of the pain I inflicted on my students.

I … gave them a worksheet.

And not just any worksheet … A GRAMMAR WORKSHEET.

And not only that … the desks were IN ROWS.  And the class was SILENT.

And you know what?  IT FELT GOOD.

Look, snarkiness aside, I know that we all try to make our lessons relevant every day and take new approaches that will get our students to think in different ways, but there are those times in the year when I know we all feel just completely tapped and are so overwhelmed that we feel like our teaching classes is actually getting in the way of doing our jobs (aka “The Battle Hymn of the Yearbook Advisor”).  So, because we haven’t had the time to research something new and exciting or book a computer lab/cart or really plan out what we’re going to do, we find ourselves at a photocopier at 7:30 in the morning before first period cranking out a hundred copies of “Correcting Sentence Fragments” or “Identifying Verb Tenses.”  I’m just trying to say that while I get caught up in what seems like almost a competition among educators to “make it good,” there are times when you are allowed to go to that old-school well.

Relax. It’s okay.  You did not just cause the downfall of Western civilization.