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“Can’t you tell that you are clinging to an outdated industrial factory-model mode of teaching that is designed to enslave students in order to create nothing but compliance to a standardized test-based regime?”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“Look, just get rid of the outdated rows and make sure that none of your students are facing you but are grouped so they can always be interacting with one another in order to minimize your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.

 

 

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?

Yet another defense of writing a paper

I created this particular wordle about essays using my advanced English 10 essay rubric (I might have added a word or two).

I was reading another post on “The Innovative Educator” the other morning and in tune with most of the other posts on that site, it advocates for caring about students and making their experiences meaningful.  They are hard things to disagree with, especially when you want your classes to care as much as you do about their learning.  But somewhere on the way to proving her point, the post’s author implies that a critical essay about literature is not a worthwhile task; at least it seems that those teachers who assign such tasks aren’t doing enough.

I guess the critical essay does sound a bit luddite and wouldn’t really be an example of a meaningful task because when students hand in a paper they are doing for me to grade and not publishing to a wiki or blog or anything for the greater world to see.  After all, I am not a real audience for them, just an example of an outdated piece of a machine that ruins any shot they have at real inteligence.  At least that’s the impression I got.

Let’s set aside those things and look at the issue at hand, which is that there is still value to be found in a critical literature essay.  I’ll make a bit of a switch and call it a “paper” instead of an “essay” because to me, “essay” implies either a piece of personal writing and not analytic writing, and I want to be clear that I am not referring to that scourge of high school English class, the five-paragraph essay.  Furthermore, since the literature paper is still a viable form of assessment, then it’s right to consider that the teacher is still a genuine audience (then again, I’ll go out on a limb and say that teachers not being “genuine” is simply a label meant to denigrate the profession and harp on the already-tired “industrial model” talking point).

But why, if said paper may never go beyond the classroom or past my desk, do I consider myself a genuine audience for my students and consider their writing a paper a genuine assessment of what they have learned in the study of literature?  I’ve touched on this subject before, but I did want to come back to it here and talk a little more about my experiences with the literature paper this year with my advanced sophomore English class.  I know that many of them are considering colleges and having gotten to know a good number of the 25 students in that particular class, I can see several of them going after acceptance from a competitive school like Virginia or William & Mary (if this were my old high school, they would be applying to at least one Ivy).  So, their immediate future more than likely involves a classroom or lecture hall and if they wind up taking a class in the humanities, they may wind up doing some sort of critical analysis by way of a paper.  So it’s still a relevant way to use a skill that’s been labeled “21st Century,” although to be honest, the lit paper has been around for quite a long time.

And come to think of it, the idea of a “closed” audience, no matter how collaborative an environment you work in, is also relevant as well.  I spent quite a number of years in sales support and marketing positions where my work was done for either my boss or someone in another department or a partner and the only people outside our company/firm who saw it were clients.  So the idea that you are producing something that’s for a specific audience and not “published” in the sense that it is available for a mass audience is also important and therefore those types of audiences (your clients, your boss, your teacher), are genuine audiences.

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.