Sara Neufeld on vacation for another nine days

I really miss Sara Neufeld over at InsideEd. I'm glad she's coming back in about a week. She might be the most important journalist in Baltimore.

Receiving class lists

Today was one of my favorite days: receiving class lists. I have no idea why I get so excited about it; I don't really know the kids yet. I guess it's just nice to know, though. My classes are, as of now, 33-32-30-29-30. Not bad, not great. I expect a few more to be added in the coming days, but, so far, my keeping of 36 desks in my room probably was overdoing it.

I get more excited looking at others' class lists: my former students and where they end up. My 9th graders from last year were some of the most memorable of my career, a large group of wonderful kids who I will track for years to come. I love the conversation with their new teachers: "Oh, wait until you meet Tre. He's huge but also goofy and sweet; you'll love him. Oh, and Teshae? So smart and so argumentative, but also sweet. You'll love her." (Truth be told, Tre just came up and visited from football practice, telling me how much he loved Octavia Butler's Kindred, his summer reading. I'm lucky to be around such cool kids year after year.)

One issue that may be raised in the next couple of days is why the English department seems to have become the mule of the school. For example, there are 10 sections of English I, and 13 sections of Humanities I and 13 sections of Biology I. I'm not sure why the same group of kids is being parsed so differently. My friend over in Social Studies has 109 total students. I have over 150 and so does everyone I know. It's strange.

Getting prepped

The thing I'm most excited about now is classlists. Who will be in my class? Will any of my classes be under 30? I'm waiting in anticipation.

Otherwise, lots of meetings, lots of time setting up classroom. Mine looks great. 90% done. Now I have to finish up my syllabi.

I love this time of year!

Last day of summer vacation

Ah, the last day of summer vacation. I went into school today to set up my classroom, and I must say, it looks great. It's 80-90% done, which makes me feel great. This is good, because I'm sure my department head is going to make me do all sorts of things not related to setting up my classroom, like cleaning out a storage room and moving around books. Her wish is my command.

(I joke, but I really don't mind.)

Otherwise, though, it was a day filled with turmoil at the school, and all over facebook, and spreading like wildfire elsewhere. Personnel decisions. I don't know what is going to happen, but it's not a happy way to start the school year.

No longer “the teacher who works at Dunkin Donuts after school just to make ends meet.”

At around the 4:48 mark in this speech, Barack Obama speaks of “the teacher who works at Dunkin Donuts after school just to make ends meet.” When he spoke this same line in Baltimore this past May, a large cadre of students around me started chanting my name. Because I was the teacher at our school with a second job. It wasn't like I spoke of it in class, but you tell one kid you can't meet with him on this Tuesday after school because of your waiting tables job, and another kid comes in during a Sunday brunch shift with her family, and you keep the job for five years, and, well, the word spreads.

But last night was my last shift ever. It was a bittersweet night, as the owners were there and pouring things down my throat that made me even more emotional than I would have been otherwise. If you walked past our restaurant at around 11pm last night, you would have heard the Motown music cranked up so loud that the windows were shaking, and me and the owner dancing together in the foyer. She said they were in denial, but I haven't worked very much since last baseball season anyway, so hopefully they're okay.

It'll be nice not to divvy myself up anymore. None of my colleagues really know me without two jobs, and a whole cycle plus of students don't either. It will be nice to be able to pick up on a weekend and get out of town if I want, or to stay late any day after school that I want. And not be on my feet so much (I'm pretty sure I have to have knee surgery this fall, after tearing a ligament playing softball). And have my Sunday nights back. All these things. But I'll sure miss the second job as well - the lifelong friends I've made, the curse of always tipping over 20% wherever I go, almost ways having cash on me. But it was time. Se la vie.

Banging out the curriculum

My friend and I teach all the same classes, heading up the Junior IB English team and the Freshman English team. She's been in Europe all summer, only returning to the Baltimore area tonight. We have been ordered by our department head to have a lunch date tomorrow, and, there, we will bang out our final curriculums for the year. We have some flexibility with our curriculum, and one of our focuses for the 9th grade is getting our texts more international.

This is my preference for those 9th graders:

September: Fences
September/October: Romeo and Juliet
October/November: To Kill a Mockingbird
November/December: excerpts from The Odyssey, Life of Pi
January: In the Time of Butterflies
February: Twelfth Night (excerpts... it's the school play)
February/March: A Lesson Before Dying
April: Persepolis
May: maybe spot for one more... or finish anything we haven't finished yet. Good time for a poetry unit, too, though we'll be integrating that all year.

We'll see. The more interesting battle will be over the Juniors, probably. I'm still finding Unbearable Lightness of Being to be fairly unbearable, but think I could teach it nonetheless - Kundera does some interesting things throughout that may be fun to analyze. I don't know. We'll negotiate. That's what it is.

We're both passionate and hyperbolic lovers of literature, so sparks may fly. But we're also good friends, so all is well.

The year is shining like new money

Tonight, on the eve of my 31st birthday, I was driving home from an especially life-affirming workout at the gym, and was struck by just how excited I am about embarking on a new school year.

My birthday always falls right before the start of the new school year, and always gives me a sense of rejuvenation, of rebirth. Teaching is the best job in the world because you have this every year, a sense of shedding the travails of the past years and starting fresh. This year, my 8th year of teaching, all at the same school, all in the Baltimore City Public Schools System, has an even greater sense of starting fresh than usual. Sunday marks the last shift at my second job, the same second job that I've worked for over five years. My MAT has given me a significant raise, probably the biggest raise I'll have in my career (I was at Step 9 last year, with just a Bachelor's Degree, now I'll be at Step 10, with a Master's Degree), and I'm ready to give up waiting tables and start pouring the energy I expended there into things that are better for me: a healthier social life, a more consistent exercise schedule, quicker turnaround on grading, more cohesive planning with other teachers and departments. It's a sad thing to leave the friends I've made waiting tables, and I genuinely enjoyed it throughout almost all of the five years, crummy tips and all, but it is time to move on.

In the last two weeks, I have met about 300 bright new 9th graders, of which I'll be teaching about 140 of them. To them, I'll be bringing the verve that comes with the completion of this summer's Teaching Shakespeare Instititute, a 4-week program that was both career-affirming and life-affirming, giving me plenty of practical ideas for the classroom and reminding me of the joy that comes with intensely studying literature. Indeed, this summer has been the most productive of my career. I saved money well for the first time, lived off the savings, made some money at the Folger Institute and invested it back into my classroom with an LCD Projector. I completed an NEH-granted program that, as aforementioned, brought me a great deal of personal satisfaction and professional growth. This was after spending a spring semester studying the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program, and completing a nearly 100-page curriculum for the 9th grade as my final graduate school project. I was learning as I was doing it then; now I know the curriculum like the back of my hand and look forward to bringing the grad school project to life in my classroom starting in a week and a half. Additionally, I have two years of teaching Junior IB English under my belt now, and am excited to again have one class of these kids. The grading is intense with this class, and having just 35 or so essays to grade when an essay is due is a great thing. My first group of kids went through the IB tests last May, and 98% passed; while most of the credit lies with their senior year teacher, I can say that at least I didn't screw them up too bad. I know and love the IB Program, and feel like it gives me great opportunities to teach materials and skills that no other program would allow me to do.

So, things are feeling great. Today, my colleagues were taking bets about when the new display television in the lobby would be stolen or vandalized, with the earliest guess being Labor Day Weekend. But I didn't participate. It's nearly impossible for me to be cynical about school or kids or teaching, especially in August. After all, I'm the one who cries at nearly all teaching movies, even Freedom Writers.

So the year is starting, and I'm more excited than I can even express. I hope this feeling in August never changes. I'm not naive; I know that when I get my classlists and count how big my classes are and add up my overall class load, that I'll probably feel some chagrin. And I know that by mid-to-late October, some of the shininess will be dimmed. I'll realize that I'll never really be able to stay on top of all the work no matter how hard I work at it; I'll realize that some of the kids just don't mesh with me; I'll realize the mistakes I've made and how hard it will be to change them. But, right now, on August 14, on my last day of being 30 years old, on the eve of what is going to be a pretty damn fun birthday pub crawl around Fells Point, at the end of my 2nd job career, at the cusp of a new school year, well, ain't nothin' gonna break my stride.