PTC – A Halloween Story?

Yesterday and today are Parent-Teacher Conferences. Yesterday we taught for a full day and then had conferences until 8 PM in the cafeteria. Things went well; I had about 25 families come in, almost all with their student. That’s better than I had some days in my more affluent schools, and definitely better in terms of having the kids present. I think that’s incredibly valuable – I don’t like the feeling of talking behind the kids’ backs, and I’m not sure how much good it does in most cases. With middle school students it wasn’t as big a deal to me, because they’re children – but high schoolers are old enough to be taking responsibility for their own success.

In order to explain why this subject even deserves a blog post, I need to rewind to last Friday. We had an in-service day, and several of us went to lunch together. While eating, we talked about conferences.

Our school has three “sessions” of PTCs at a go. There’s the evening session on Wednesday that lasts three hours. Then there’s a full-day session, from 8:30-4, on Thursday. Finally, there’s a third evening session from 5-8 on Thursday. The evening sessions take place in the cafeteria, where we’re lined up at tables in alphabetical order and families mill around like they’re registering for college classes on a pre-internet campus. The day session takes place in our individual classrooms.

The idea of having conferences in our classrooms is kind of nice. We don’t have an Open House/Back-to-School Night, so this is a parent’s first opportunity to see my classroom. (And I have a nice one, so I like to show it off.) Even better, in between conferences I can get work done. I’ve got a lovely list of to-do items today, including reorganizing my desk and putting together my file cabinet. I couldn’t do that if I was stuck in the cafeteria.

At lunch last Friday, though, it came out that there’s a flip side to the situation. My department head warned me that I might – or would – encounter the following situations while alone in my room:

• drunken parents
• irrationally angry parents
• dangerously violent parents
• parents deliberately coming during the day so that they’ll find it easier to try to bully the isolated teacher
• parents in their pajamas
• parents in… uhm… school-inappropriate attire
• parents looking for other teachers and deciding that I look like a likely receptacle for their off-base personal attacks of said teachers
• parents strung out on meth (see bullets 2 & 3)

I was advised to leave my door open, to open up the doors of the teacher work area so that there’s a straight path between my room and those on the other side of the wing, to have a plan for enlisting the help of either of the able-bodied men whose classrooms adjoin mine, and to have the admin/security’s number memorized. In what may have been a coincidence, we got a district-wide email the day before PTC reminding us that you have to punch 9 before dialing 911 on our classroom phones.

I’m… flabbergasted. And curious. I wonder if it will really happen? A couple of the teachers I ate with claimed to have had any number of the above walk into their classrooms over the years, but I don’t know how exaggerated it all is. I mean, yes – the Rural School District is “tougher” than most of the Urban SD, and much more so than most of the Suburban SD.

I’ve set up my conference area by the door. Visitors will sit in student desks, which means that they have to slide out of their seats sideways. I’ve got a moveable chair on the other side of the student desks, and I wore sensible shoes. I don’t think anything is going to happen today – all of my parents yesterday were super nice, even those whose kids were failing. But if something does, I don’t want to have to use my ninja skills on them.

Trying not to be pigheaded

They’re giving out vaccinations against the H1N1 virus, but you can only get them if you’re in one of the following categories:

• pregnant women
• caregivers/contacts for infants younger than 6 months
• healthcare/EMS personnel
• people 6 months through 24 years old
• people with health conditions that exacerbate complications from flu

My students, all of whom are between the ages of 15 and 18, are eligible to receive the virus.

My school is in Rural School District. I live in Urban School District, about half an hour’s drive (under normal traffic situations) from my school. Here’s a map to help you visualize the geography:

I don’t know who funded it, but free H1N1 vaccination clinics were held at every school in the Urban and Suburban Districts this past week. Their intent was to vaccinate every student. (Unfortunately, they ran out of vaccines.) They did not send vaccines to the Rural School District, or to any of the other districts except the USD and SSD. I guess it’s okay if the RSD kids get swine flu?

Meanwhile, some of these smaller districts are reeling. I know someone whose school is having a 22% absentee rate, and I’ve heard numbers up to 30%. One district was completely shut down because over half of their teachers were out sick.

Wait – teachers?

Okay, obviously, some teachers are pregnant, live with infants, are under the age of 25, or have special health considerations. But there’s an awful lot of us who don’t fall under those categories.

In any given week – assuming I don’t ever leave my classroom – I directly interact with 170 students. That’s 170 kids that I could infect with H1N1, and 170 kids who could infect me. Each of those students has eight classes, and each class has between 20-40 students in it (except for ensemble/PE classes, which are larger). If I get H1N1, I could conceivably take down a very large portion of the school, just by infecting students who would pass it on to their classmates.

We’ve already had a great deal of absenteeism due to flu and, reportedly, swine flu – including some of my students. I guess that means I’ve already been exposed, to some degree.

We’re one of 41 states listed as having “wide-spread influenza activity.” At least seven people in our state (not an insignificant number compared to our relatively small population) have died as a result of H1N1.

I know several teachers who have already missed a week or more of school due to flu or H1N1 this year. The cost of teacher absenteeism is significant – not only does it cost the district money to hire a substitute, but students lose valuable instructional time. Even the best substitute isn’t the regular teacher and can’t teach in the exact same way. On top of that, schools receive their yearly budgets based on how many kids are sitting in seats during the first six weeks of school. Absenteeism due to illness has been so high this year that several school districts are facing catastrophic budget cuts.

Come ON, people. How can teachers not be a recommended group for H1N1 vaccines? We work with the highest risk group there is. I’m lucky; my room has windows and ventilation and room to move and breathe. Last year, I worked in a petri dish: completely sealed, too small, no air circulation, very rarely cleaned with real chemicals.

This isn’t a very well-organized post, but I’m aggravated and wanted to write about it. How are they handling vaccinations in your area? What do you think about distributing free vaccines to the wealthier, more prominent districts but not the small-town and rural districts? Do you think teachers ought to be in the target group?

The Nice Thing About Teaching…

…is that, for 7.5 hours a day, you can feel in control of your own life.

SRSLY OMG

There’s a big push in the school to work toward creating this community of teachers who clearly care about the kids and – accordingly – are happy to make dorks of themselves in public, if it helps build that community. It’s pretty awesome. Very much my sort of environment.

(This brings me to a whole different subject, which would be that I am a failure at this whole BEING AN INTROVERT thing, but that’s probably a post for another time.)
 
Somehow or the other, I’ve managed to get myself roped into two rather unnerving events this month. Wondering if I’m really quite as brave as I thought when I agreed to it!
 
Friday there’s going to be a pep assembly, and I got asked to round out the female talent for a game of The Singing Bee. Apparently I’ll be standing up in front of the school, and they’ll play part of a familiar song, and then stop the music, and I have to keep singing and hopefully get the lyrics right. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

(For those of you new to the show, I’m not a singer. Really.)
 
Then, later this month, they’re having the First Annual Teacher Talent Show. And – again, mysteriously – I appear to be on the list as a piano soloist. SERIOUSLY, ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?

:Shrug: If I can dress up like a superhero and disco in front of 700 middle schoolers, I can stand in front of 1,500 high schoolers and forget the lyrics to Michael Jackson songs.

Teacher Education, Teacher Practice

After a year of being in the trenches, and after a lot of reading the blogs and books of other teachers, I’ve got a question.

How often do good teachers go against what they’ve been taught in their college teacher education classes?

Mr. Bees is a constitutional law nut, and he’s tried to teach me the difference between “conservative/liberal” in political terms versus “conservative/liberal” in constitutional/Supreme Court terms. I’m going to attempt to use the latter definitions of the words to refer to teacher-ed classes.

It seems to me that my graduate coursework in teacher education was very liberal, very progressive. We’re taught to be very student-centered, to avoid tests (especially multiple-choice tests), to focus on multiple intelligences, to arrange desks in staggered horseshoes and never in straight rows. We’re taught simultaneously to join our teacher union – for CYA purposes – and that unions are undesirable as one of the primary reasons that teachers lack professional respect. We’re taught that reading a book to your class is equivalent to having them read it themselves, that students should have as many opportunities as they wish to redo assignments or tests, and – especially – that teachers who differ from this methodology are not good teachers.

“Taught” is, at times, too mild a word – in retrospect, I recognize that we were often being indoctrinated.

I bought into it whole-heartedly. It’s appealing stuff, and the passionate rhetoric wrought up in the buzzwords sounds as good to administrators as it does to the young, idealistic teacher.

Now, however, I begin to wonder…

Have I contracted the dreaded “teacher digging in heels to remain in the good ole ways” disease? Or is additional experience and perspective showing me that conservative educational methodology isn’t necessarily bad?

What really works? What’s really the best? Is it really as loosey-goosey as “different things work for different teachers”?

I don’t have any deep thoughts or profound conclusions. Just hoping to start a conversation. Let me know what you think.

ALA Recommendations for YA Libraries

I recently went to the website for the American Library Association in search for more information on the Printz Award. I’d picked up several YA books in the past that had won this award, and thought they were particularly outstanding.

While wandering around the site, I found the ALA’s “Ultimate YA Bookshelf.” It’s a list of fifty books, five magazines, and five audiobooks that every good YA library should have.

I’ve included the list of books below, highlighting those I own. I’ve got some work to do…

1. Acceleration by Graham McNamee
2. Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce
3. All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot
4. American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
5. Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix
6. Beauty by Robin McKinley
7. Black and White by Paul Volponi
8. Blizzard! The Storm that Changed America by Jim Murphy
9. Bone series by Jeff Smith
10. The Book Thief by Mark Zusak
11. Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
12. The Chosen by Chaim Potok
13. The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition by Anne Frank
14. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
15. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
16. Fat Kid Rules the World by K.L. Going
17. Feed by M.T. Anderson
18. Fruits Basket series by Natsuki Takaya
19. The First Part Last by Angela Johnson
20. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
21. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
22. The Guinness Book of World Records
23. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
24. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
25. The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
26. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
27. I Know What You Did Last Summer by Lois Duncan
28. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
29. If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson
30. The Killer’s Cousin by Nancy Werlin
31. Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen
32. Looking for Alaska by John Green
33. Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff
34. My Heartbeat by Garret Freymann-Weyr
35. A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly
36. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
37. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi
38. The Pigman by Paul Zindel
39. The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot
40. Rules of the Road by Joan Bauer
41. Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta
42. Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie by David Lubar
43. Son of the Mob by Gordon Korman
44. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
45. Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher
46. Stuck in Neutral by Terry Trueman
47. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
48. Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
49. The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
50. Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block

I’ve got 2/5 of the audiobooks, but in print-book format.

Summer Passing

I finally received an email containing part of the curriculum I’ll be teaching next year.

My district is highly structured in some ways (similar concepts are taught at the same time, district-wide) but less so in other ways (there is only one absolutely required text per grade level; the rest is at the teacher’s discretion). For my tenth graders, I’ll be teaching To Kill a Mockingbird. I’m not fantastically excited about TKAM, to be honest; I like the story, but am not sure what it is like to teach it. I’m going to be meeting with a friend who loved teaching it to her ninth graders – hopefully that will give me a spark of inspiration!

Now I’m finally in a position where I can begin planning. I have a job, I have a grade level, I know some of my curriculum…

…and there is so much I had planned to do this summer…

…and it’s half over. More than half over. How did this happen?

I feel deeply frustrated.

Three Ghosts?

I don’t, for whatever reason, dream about teaching. That’s bothered me a little bit. If you care about something as much as I care about teaching, shouldn’t it invade your dreams? My colleagues talk about their teaching dreams…

Last night was no exception, on the surface. I did, however, dream about some of my students.

I was at a football game, and one of the players was a boy named [C]. He was one of my very favorite students during my student teaching: a strong, sensitive, brilliant boy who could write poetry as well as he could find the end zone. You know, the sort of kid who only actually exists in cheesy movies – except he’s for real. In real life he’s still in high school, but in my dream he’d grown several inches and many pounds and was a star of the local college team.

I was sitting outside the stadium with a small group of people, feeling lonely and slightly irritated about something (I think it had to do with people over-imbibing, given a comment someone in my dream made, but that’s irrelevant) when up comes [C], fresh from a victory. He sat down and talked to me for a while, genuinely happy to see me. It was clear that we were friends, not just former student/teacher. It was a lovely feeling. We walked away together, talking.

From there, I walked into a very full room – a band room, I think, that was being used as a presentation room for some sort of meeting. The first person to meet me at the door was [J], one of  my current students, only instead of being thirteen she was closer to 30. Also, instead of being one of my least favorite faces to see in the morning, she was someone near and dear to my heart. We greeted each other, so happy to see one another. Again, it was clear that our relationship was one between friends, not a teacher and a student.

I took my seat on the far side of the room, melancholy again because [C] had had to leave and [J] was working and couldn’t come hang out with me. And then, there I saw him: [T], my best friend from high school and much of college, the kid so much a part of me that I sometimes can’t distinguish whether he was a friend or a relative or what. Despite the fact that [T] and I parted ways, somewhat non-amicably, years ago, he still haunts my dreams. I miss him horribly.

In my dream he came over and sat by me, and it was the most wonderful thing ever. We hadn’t ever fought. We hadn’t ever grown apart. It was like our friendship had just continued on, and we were now at the natural point that a friendship would have reached after (counting…) thirteen years. If you’ve ever wrapped yourself up in a blanket fresh out of the dryer, you know how good that dream-segment felt.

Then I woke up, smiling – literally, which is unusual for me – and it took me a good three or four minutes before I realized that [T] was no longer a part of my life, and that [J] was still an unusually obnoxious seventh grader, and that [C] probably didn’t even know who I was anymore.

Why be visited by these three specters? [T], I get. I can even understand [C]. But [J]?? Weird.

An Epigram

Someone I know – I think of him as a friend, in that loose sort of friendship that can be held between two people who have spoken in person half a dozen times – keeps a blog. He used to think he was going to be a teacher, and his blog was a “critically-acclaimed” edublog (by which I mean, it was nominated for online awards of some sort, and received a lot of votes). He’s a terrific writer, actually, and a strikingly intelligent young man. If I remember correctly, he earned a double major with student teaching in three years – if that tells you anything about him.

He’s also (and forgive me for unintentionally referencing the election) rather a maverick. For better or worse, he didn’t believe in following the rules and protocol of a student teacher. Most damning for him, he refused to play the political game – playing nice with the certifying institution, keeping on his internship school’s good side, keeping a good safe distance between his blog and his classroom. All the time that his blog was getting accolades for its cutting observation of the failures of public education, the main thing that I kept wondering was how any 20-something-year-old student teacher could possibly be so convinced that he knew so much better than entire schools and colleges full of trained and experienced professionals. I mean, for me, student teaching was a learning experience. I knew that I wasn’t a master teacher; I knew that I might become one someday, but not without the help of those who went before me, and not without a lot of practice. Where did he get such overriding confidence?

The short version of Blogfriend’s story is that he got caught blogging derogative things about his internship school, college, mentors, colleagues, etc., was unrepentant (perhaps correctly so – I try not to judge) and ended up leaving the program just shy of certification. (I’m not telling tales out of school; he blogged frankly about the entire situation, and you could read about it firsthand if you went to his site.) For a while he blogged openly about how he had decided teaching was not for him. Now, he seems to have changed his tune, as he is substitute teaching and applying for teaching positions. I can only hope that he no longer disdains teaching as much as he claimed only 2-3 months ago, for his potential students’ sakes.

For months I read Blogfriend’s posts and kept my thoughts to myself. Sure, there were times when I hollered in disgust, read a particularly pompous or ill-advised passage to my husband, and surfed away before my fingers could begin responding. But usually I just rolled my eyes and went along my way.

Then he posted a short entry titled “Educational Epigram”:

Show me someone who says teaching is the hardest job they’ve ever done, and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t remember working for a wage.

I am not ashamed to say that I totally lost my cool (although I do wish I’d calmed down enough to edit my vocabulary). I replied:

Bulls—. Spoken like someone who hasn’t actually been a real teacher yet. You spout out this crap as if you’re this 40 year old guy who has some actual life experience, but [name]? Y’know what? You’re a kid. You went straight from HS to college, straight from college to student teaching, and straight from student teaching to being a student teaching dropout who posts bulls— blog entries about a profession you know nothing about. I’m sorry to go all ballistic on your blog here, but seriously. Get a grip on your ego, why don’t you? Take it from someone who has worked for wages, worked for a corporate salary, and is now exhausted from working as hard as she has ever worked in her damn life.

He has replied, telling me that I obviously haven’t been reading his blog, because he’s talking about substitute teaching – something he claims to know much more about than I do. Maybe that’s true; I only subbed for a short period of time before I successfully completed my program and got hired as an in-service teacher. Then he finishes it off with what I suppose he thought was a stinger:

Maybe the problem here is that I don’t deny myself the satisfaction of a simple, succinct declarative. If that’s what bothers you, pretend I’m practicing for middle age, when I can actually start using them.

I started to post my response there, but then I remembered that I had my own blog – with or without any readers, since I never post – and I brought my final comment home. I don’t deny myself the satisfaction of a simple, succinct declarative, either. The difference is that I am an adult, and I know better than to post my declaratives publicly, with my name attached, on a forum read by my future employers. I know better than to thumb my nose at the industry I want to join before I even get a chance to join it. I know better than to burn my bridges while I am trying to cross them.

If you want an epigram from me, try this one: Show me a rookie teacher who thinks they know everything there is to know about teaching, and I’ll show you a teacher that I never want teaching my children or working in my school.

Sorry, Blogfriend, but you’re stepping on the wrong toes. Back off, and like I said: get a grip.

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