Being accused of being a heroin addict and using my teacher parking sticker to go free

Only nominally teaching-related, but I was lost in the Pigtown area on Saturday, looking for my friend's place right off of Washington Blvd., when I was pulled over. And I'm talking bad. I was on Lombard (right off of MLK Blvd.), looking for Washington, when the lights and sirens pulled sounded behind me, and, within one moment, I was ordered out of the car, onto the curb, with my hands behind my back and my legs straight out. It was in the middle of broad daylight, and all I could think about was whether one of my students would walk by or drive by. The doofus officers, younger than me, made me feel a bit like I was on Candid Camera, especially when they searched my car (!) and my person and said things to me like, "Well, we just don't understand it... here you are, a guy who likes to take care of himself, you have a dog, you have a baseball glove and a gym dog, and you're down here buying heroin?". I was simultaneously amused and pissed off at the suggestion; are there really a whole lot of 240-lb heroin addicts in the city?

And they kept at me for about fifteen minutes, checking out my story that I was lost and yelling at me to keep my legs straight and my back straight or they'd shove my face into the concrete. Apparently I was in the highest heroin-traffic area of the city, and they accused me of rolling a stop sign (my guess is that I was a white guy there, and they were looking for a reason to pull me over, and made that one up, because I didn't see any sort of stop sign so if I ran one I full-out ran one, didn't just "roll through" it). Eventually, I got to the point where I thought I might be arrested or ticketed or something, and my shocked bemusement turned to anger, and I began pulling out all the stops - telling them to look at the teacher sticker on my windshield, even telling them that my dad is a retired police officer. It eventually worked, but I don't think they ever believed me, even taking down my friend's name and number to "check" on my story about getting lost. They checked if I had warrants, and finally let me go, telling me that if they saw me in this neighborhood in five minutes they'd arrest me. I hightailed it out of there and made it to the Redskins game just fine, with a story to tell of a couple of farmboy officers with too much time on their hands and a high level of dumbassery.

Darn Bess, the Blocking Webpage

One of the big focuses of the Teaching Shakespeare Institute was using technology in the English classroom. I was hesitant, but ended up learning a lot, and was inspired to purchase an LCD Projector for my classroom for that reason. I also spent some time building a website for my classes, as well as setting up a wikispaces page for materials, online discussions, and resources.

Today, I was finally able to get online at school for the first time. I plugged in my laptop, checked my email, then immediately went to my googlespaces page I set up for school.

BLOCKED.

Then, I went to wikispaces.com to see my class setup there.

BLOCKED.

Wow, was I ever mad. I really want to incorporate technology and prepare my students for college and the 21st century, but it's the question of whether my school system will allow it.

After telling my story to a colleague, he told me he heard that the system will soon block free email sites as well, like gmail and yahoo. If this happens, I have no idea how I will be able to ask my students for typed papers anymore. The common thing to do is for students to email the document to themselves and print it out. In fact, that's how I print out every single handout I've ever made for school... without a printer at home, I rely on my printer at school.

I'm going to brainstorm ideas. There's a long complicated process of trying to get a webpage approved through the central offices, but no one I know of has been successful.

Ideas welcome.

Good press and help

It's so nice to have some positive press about teacher surpluses and smaller class sizes in the Baltimore City Public Schools.

I have not agreed with everything I have heard or seen from Dr. Alonso, but he sure seems to be steering things in the right direction in a lot of ways.

I sure hope those smaller class sizes make their way to me. I have averaged 33-36 in the last few years, making for a very difficult grading load and a cramped classroom. According to the article, there is now a 25.2:1 student:teacher ratio in the high schools in the BCPSS. These numbers are often skewed by who is counted as a teacher and other factors that I don't understand (somehow, a webpage published our school's ratio as 18:1 last year, which, as far as I could tell, was just a little more than half as big as it actually was). Still, the fact that the ratio is decreasing has got to be considered a major step in the right direction.

Heck, I even got a return email about my certification question from last week. I have never received a return email from someone at North Avenue before. The website is still pretty unmanageable and I had to ask around to find the correct email address for certification, but, once I did, it took less than a week for a reply.

(Not that it was good news, by the way. It looks like I have to take both of those dumb reading classes, unless - and I'm hoping this happens - one of my Towson MAT courses will double as one of them. Please, Towson, come through for me. They're reviewing my transcript as we speak. Or, rather, I handed it to a harried receptionist at North Avenue in the very busy Human Resources office about an hour ago, so it'll at least be on someone's desk in the next couple of days.)

Mosying and back-piecing

The kids took to today's lesson pretty well, and I think it worked just fine. Lots of good discussion in the groups, several little skills honed, even a last-minute mini-lesson on Cornell Notes I threw in there. However, the timing was off. It's an interesting teaching exercise to teach within in isolated lessons, unable to say to myself, "Oh, we can finish that tomorrow." As a teacher, my larger strength is my unit plans rather than the individual lesson plans. Teaching a fairly isolated 60-minute lesson to kids I may or may not be teaching for the school year is a useful exercise for me, because it makes me go at a rather rapid pace, something I'm not exactly known for in the classroom. I'm just rarely in a rush to do anything, whether it's teaching or in life, and tend to focus heavily on whether the kids are getting it rather than whether I'm getting through what I need to get through. That's not a bad thing - it's better to focus on the kids getting it than moving on just because I'm trying to cover "content" - but we all need balance, and this teaching exercise of isolated lessons (and no homework) offers that.

*****

Teachers don't get our class lists until August 19th. In addition, while a few of my colleagues have received their schedules in the mail, I have not. Every day, I anxiously open the mailbox hoping that my schedule is in there. It hasn't been, yet.

However, the students have started receiving theirs. So over the last few days, a steady stream of kids have approached me and told me they have me as their teacher. I don't know them that well, but I know them a bit, so every time it happens it gets me a little excited. It also offers a kind of interesting back-piecing of my schedule together. For example, I know I teach 1st and 2nd period, and 10th period, and 6/7th period. That leaves 8/9th period, which I think will probably be my class of IB Juniors, and 3rd, 4th, and 5th periods, which are split periods and will probably be my planning time. That's slightly different from last year, which is a good thing, because I like a little variety; I'm teaching the same classes as last yer so I need to find it whatever way I can.

I admit I'm getting pretty excited about the start of the school year. The wax on the second floor should be dry by tomorrow, and I hope to start getting up there and setting up my classroom!

The lesson that will change all their lives forever... Or... At least it's finally done. Let's see how it goes.

I have sixty minutes to spend with them. They got to choose between any one of four books - Dandicat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, Marcus Zusak's The Book Theif, Daj Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, and Allan Stratton's Chanda's Secrets. My job was to create a lesson that got all the kids involved, that introduced and reinforced the concept of the Areas of Interaction in the Middle Years Program, and "covered" the summer reading.

I've been racking my brain for the last week or so about how to do this. Finally, I have come up with something. I have to do this lesson nine times next week, so hopefully it'll be perfect by time 4 or so.

8 minutes: Introduction to Areas of Interaction and Areas of Interaction in the English Classroom

5 minutes: Introduction to the genre of Coming of Age / Students take notes

2 minutes: put students into groups based on what book they chose

30 minutes: time to complete group activities. I have created one for each Area of Interaction that can be applied to all of the books.

10 minutes: present 60-second book "commercials," which was one of the tasks in the group activity

We'll see how it goes. I'm excited, at least.

How it feels to be colored me

Today was our 'How It Feels to Be Colored Me' bag day, where we read the Zora Neale Hurston essay the previous day, focusing at her conclusion, in which she writes about seeing herself as a "brown bag of miscellany." The next day - today - we all brought in our own bag of miscellany and presented to the class.

Most kids remembered. Some put some thought into it. Some clearly did it just before class, as the girl with the McDonald's bag, in which she had her I-Pod (to represent her love of music), her pencil (to represent her love of writing), and her lip gloss (to represent her girly-girlishness). But others were very moving and revealing.

The one I remember most didn't bring a bag, though. He forgot. But as we came to this young man, this quiet kid with glasses who has come late every day this week, sitting in the corner, he stomped his feet, saying that it represented him being in school, and that's important, because of the pressure he feels to be the first male in his extended family to graduate high school. And that was cool, and gutsy, and made me pretty glad I'd done this slightly cheesy activity.

Unbearable, indeed.

So my colleague wants to teach Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being next year to Juniors.

Our curriculum is a constant give-and-take, push-and-pull. But we get along well and make compromises and such.

But I cannot stand this book. Lugubrious and Ponderous. And I think the kids will hate it.

I'm going to keep plugging away, but I feel a battle brewing.

To be fair, I'm only on page 30. But that's 8 separate sitdowns with it. I can't go more than a few pages at once.