It's official - blog is changing back

I'm barely blogging enough for one blog now, let alone two, so I have decided to just blog at the old blog site: Epiphany in Baltimore. I'll mix my teaching stories and reflections with my life stories like I used to, and hopefully get in a better habit of writing more often. For the foreseeable future, bmoreteach is done - Epiphany in Baltimore (a better title, anyway) is re-animated.

Letters of Recommendation

Grades are due sometime soon (strange new system this year, and it seems like they're due sometime between Nov. 5 and Nov. 9, but I'm not quite sure), and I have a ton of grading left to do. I tried to create lessons this week that would allow me to get some of this grading done during class time, but, as usually happens with this, I'm left jumping around and helping kids, even though I was hoping the assignments would be mostly independent. Today, I had a classroom full of students until nearly 5pm, without much of a chance to work, and, after dinner, sat down to plan my lesson for tomorrow. Instead of grading, I'm now working on Letters of Recommendation, because a bunch of my students have early decision applications out or nearly out.

Despite my busy-ness, I actually really enjoy writing Letters of Rec, especially for students I genuinely enjoy. I feel honored to be asked and, after teaching the current seniors for their junior and senior year, I'm being asked a lot. That's okay. Grading can wait until the weekend.

Back to it now.

Halloween in the English Department

Every year, for the last four years, the English department has all dressed up as characters from literature (generally a 9th grade book, since us 9th grade teachers usually direct everyone else). We have a fun time with it, running into classrooms with goofily planned skits, and give the first kid to get all the roles correct a prize. Here are my roles, through the years.

2006: Jem in To Kill a Mockingbird

2007: Cyclops in The Odyssey
2008: Romeo in Romeo and Juliet
2009: The narrator in "The Scarlet Ibis"

So, this year, I play a teenage kid who has internal turmoil because he's embarassed because his brother is handicapped. He ends up running away from his brother during a storm, during which lightning hits his little brother, killing him. That's just a few hours after the whole family had found a displaced scarlet ibis in their front yard, who promptly dies in front of them. Doodle (the little brother) had felt a strange connection to the bird, and buried him. Within a few hours, he himself is dead. The symbolism blares like neon lights, but the story is still deeply affecting - one of the saddest you'll ever read. We'll camp it up though.

Dying Inside Ed

A year or so ago, Inside Ed crackled with energy, focusing primarily on city schools and issues therein.

I rarely check it now, but stopped in last week when they were talking about technology, an issue I'm pretty passionate about. It's infuriating to me that the school system blocks so much material, and that teachers cannot override it. Our students deserve the free and open technology that the WWW offers and that most school districts can access. It's not right that I have to create a blog that students can only see from their home computers with clips from Shakespeare movies.

I made a couple of comments last week, and went back to check it out today. It hasn't been updated in 6 days.

The death of Inside Ed has sadly been pretty rapid. If you're looking for a reason why newspapers are dying, the shutting down of interest sites like Inside Ed is one of the reasons.

May all your fences have gates

Immersed in Fences again with the 9th graders. It's the first thing we've read together in high school and, for many of them, will be their favorite book they read this year.

My 8/9th period has one of the better Troy Maxsons I've ever had. Just a really good reader. Doesn't look like him at all, but has the tone and cadence just right.

My 10th period doesn't have a natural Troy. On Friday, a whip-smart girl played him, and did just fine. She was absent today, so I had a little Latino kid (a good baseball player, too, he tells me - let's hope so) who volunteered play him. Cory was played by a white Jewish kid, adding humor to the "and liking your black ass wasn't part of the deal" that August Wilson never intended. (Troy says this to Cory when Cory - his son - asks Troy if why he "ain't never liked" him.) Today was the day I got to explain all the baseball allusions (Roberto Clemente, Josh Gibson, Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax), so it's one of my favorite days of the year.

What a plodding, rainy day, though. Looking forward to the weekend already.

Beginning Fences

I've taught August Wilson's Fences nearly every year of my 9-year career, but I don't think I've ever had as successful an opening lesson as I did today. And, unbelievably, I got the idea from research done in one of those horrible 'Reading in the Content Area' classes last year.

Photos of characters from the internet, predictions, 'reading' images - it got the kids excited and catalyzed some real analysis. They were already excited about reading the text; now they're even moreso.

I gave them a boring homework reading about The Great Migration to temper that a little bit, though. :(

A very tired Wednesday night

I have not shared that I'm doing National Board Certification this year. The whole thing. It's a lot of work and I've only barely begun.

I'm starting Fences tomorrow. For some reason, I re-invent the wheel every year, and I'm working steadfastly on a unit plan right now. I want to do less reading in class this year, and more writing at home.

Much Ado About Nothing is going well. I think the students are liking it. I'm contemplating a rather major change to the curriculum (the texts have not been submitted to IB yet) that I will decide on in the next week. Basically, I'm concerned about the length of East of Eden for this part of the curriculum, and might switch it into Semester 2. That will throw everything out of whack, and I have to figure out if it's worth it. There have been a lot of interruptions this month, though, and I'm concerned.

Today, in the Mailbox: Two great items

1) 45 tickets to see the Folger Shakespeare Library's production of Much Ado About Nothing. This is very exciting for me, because I chose to teach the play based on being able to see it live in November (I'm thinking about crafting my curriculum every year at least, in part, to what Shakespeare play is being performed in the area). I haven't organized a field trip in many years, and even though it's a fairly small group of older students, doing it completely alone (I'm the only one who teaches the class) is a little nerve-racking. I've put the $810 down for the tickets out of my own bank account, and right there that is scary, but also getting all of these young people down to DC is also scary. I think we're all going to take the MARC train down (at non-peak times and with the group rates, that's pretty cheap), and be able to explore the area a little bit after the play as well.

Getting the tickets today, as well as a pamphlet about the play, renewed my excitement for going to see it. Much Ado is set in modern-day DC, with a multi-ethnic cast, and Caribbean cast, and, most interestingly to me, they've made Borachio into a woman who has designs on Margaret, one of Hero's gentlewomen. In other words, this is Shakespeare with a modern edge, and I think the kids will really enjoy it. To say I'm pumped is an understatement.

2) My certification, which expired in July 2009, was wrangled free from North Avenue bureocracy and has officially been renewed through 2014. I took the (ridiculous, mind-numbing, the-state-should-be-embarassed-to-require-these) through the school year in 2008-2009, and submitted the paperwork in June, and was told upon my return to school that my paperwork was held up by an audit performed by the state on BCPSS' re-certification practices. But the holdup wasn't long and I'm now a possessor of a Standard Professional Certificate II, which is good for five years. Woo-hoo!

Skinny Maxsons

Spent some time planning my Fences unit today during professional development. I started a blog (blocked at school, ridiculously) for youtube clips from plays we are reading in class, and will add this one from Fences to it. Without a film version of this play (Wilson was finicky), and without students being able to access YouTube at school, I'm limited inexposing kids to it and allowing them to read it visually.

These kids from Towson do one of the better scenes I've seen while looking around YouTube. Both are too skinny and young, but otherwise I think it's pretty good.



What happened to the 2009 revival of Fences on Broadway, starring Suzan-Lori Parks (and rumored to be starring Forrest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey)? Google offers no help.

Strange Schedule

It's one of those strange times in the school year when it feels like I'm not teaching at all.

This is particularly true for the Seniors. Last week, I started a new unit on Thursday, knowing that I wouldn't see them on Friday (Senior Inaugeration), Tuesday (big field trip to the National Zoo for nearly all of them), Wednesday (PSAT day), Thursday or Friday (both Inservice). So, by the time I see them next, we'll have been a week and a half into our Much Ado About Nothing unit, with only two days of instruction. It's a bummer that it all seems to bunch up at once, but it does.

Today was a decent day, though. The 9th-11th graders sat for the PSAT from 8:15-11:30, and teachers had inservice about how to increase scores in the afternoon. We have some pretty amazing data that our students are general at the national average for PSAT students taking the test in the 9th grade (compared to other 9th graders), but we drop in the 10th and 11th grade as compared to the counterparts. It's sobering data, but, like most educational data, there are some asterisks involved: First off, a very small percentage of students take the PSAT in the 9th grade around the country; secondly, we looked at the data from the classes of 2009, 2010, and 2011, all of whom are different students.

Still, even with these caveats, the data was still disappointing, so our meeting today was about improving our scores. I'm optimistic that we're working towards this common goal, and we'll see how it goes. For me, it was mostly an opportunity to think about something I feel like I think about all the time in instruction in the 9th and 10th grades: Vocabulary. Our students don't really have any, and that's one reason they score poorly on the PSAT and SAT. I'm a fan of vocabulary workbooks and wish we would invest in them.

Busy Weekend

School is kicking my butt pretty good lately, so I decided to dedicate an entire weekend to grading and planning. I eschewed an invitation to the Michael Moore movie to grade essays last night. Today, in between and after two separate gym trips (also have to get myself healthier, big time), I graded and graded. And started writing a unit test.

This is a rather light week coming up (big Senior field trip on Tuesday, PSAT on Wednesday, Professional Development on Thurs-Fri), and I want to be able to devote these days to planning an excellent Fences unit that will help me knock out a couple of National Board requirements, plus working on things related to the job but that I never seem to get a chance to plan: my NCTE presentation, which is swiftly coming up on November 19th; all the paperwork for my field trip to the Folger, which is coming up on Nov. 12th; and National Board stuff, which will be a big part of this year the more I get into it.

Much Ado About October

I was reminded of my blog today, and do miss writing in bursts longer than Facebook updates.

We are now roughly six weeks into the school year. Today, with the seniors, we started Much Ado About Nothing. I got the texts in the late afternoon yesterday, and, because I had to go to a play last night, didn't re-read and mark my copy, so I was getting it almost as fresh as the students. I read it last summer, and even performed in it, but I was remembering the situations as they came. I didn't feel as well-prepared as I would have liked, and in a perfect world would have started the text on Friday, but Friday is a half day and Seniors have their Senior Inauguration and won't be attending class.

I think it will be a fun teach and that the students will like it. It got some giggles and laughs in the early Beatrice/Benedict banter. We're going to watch a production of the play on Nov. 12 at the Folger Library in DC.

As for the 9th graders, I'm desperate to start a book, because I really dislike teaching out of a textbook. This is partly because we don't have enough to send home with the students, so it's rough trying to make meaningful home assignments. I like what I'm doing this week, though. Next week is a 2-day week (Monday and Tuesday, then the PSAT on Wednesday and Professional Development on Thurs-Fri). It looks like we'll start August Wilson's Fences on Monday, October 19th. It's one of my favorite teaches and I look forward to putting those textbooks back on the windowsill, forgotten until next year.

Otherwise, it's been an alright year. I'm pretty exhausted, and really need to exercise more and get healthier - that will help. Baseball season being over (for the Tigers) will help. The work is beginning to pile up as it always does in October, though. I'm looking forward to hopefully having some time in my classroom with my stacks and stacks of paperwork during the Prof. Dev days next week.

In other news, my cell phone went off for the first time today. My ring tone is a loud Jay-Z song. Yes, the students were amused. I hope they also recognized the irony that I have a song that declares "This is anti-autotune, death of the ringtone" as my ringtone.

Richard 3 letter

I wonder if you can read between the lines in this email that I'm actually kind of seething about some of my students' performance. I wasn't mad until I was going over the quiz answers today and kids were looking out the window, muttering, etc. Grrrr.

Greetings parents and students of IB English IV:

As the 4th week of class comes to a close, I wanted to provide you with a brief update about the course.

Several of you received emails from me today about your student's success or struggles with the first Richard III quiz. I am very happy with the progress of several students, and disappointed with the progress (and efforts) of others. Most of the assessments so far this year up until now have been baselines, but this quiz was definitely an important harbinger of things to come, so I wanted to let parents know right away about how students did.

The reading pace of Richard III has been fairly rapid, but not rapid enough so that students in a college-level English course should not be able to keep up. I have eliminated the time-consuming practice of text-marking as the students read, because we are focusing on different skills this year, and students are completing dialectical journals instead. In class, I have been shifting between group assignments, dramatic activities (re: "acting it out"), and comparison analysis of different film versions of the play, doing whatever I can to make Shakespeare come alive for the students.

Still, Shakespeare can be tough. Students have to struggle with the language for it to start to make sense for them. The quizzes are miniature replicas of the oral assessments students will complete in January, and thus things like Sparknotes or modernized translated versions of the plays are not helpful. We are reading the Shakespeare for the language, not the story. Thus, attitude is important. Students should know that, as they read, they will encounter difficulty, and that they must go slow, and read and re-read, and use the summaries in our version of the book provides, and make sure they understand before they move on. And then read it again (it's not long; to view this onstage, it would take only 2 hours).

For students who are struggling the most, here are some suggestions:

1) Sit in a quiet place in the house and just read, away from the computer, away from the phone. Use the glossary, have a dictionary nearby to look up any other unfamiliar words, and picture what you are seeing on the page. Read sentence by sentence, not line by line. This will get easier as you go, but you have to put in the work for it to happen.

2) Use the list of characters to create a graphical illustration of all the characters and their relationships, and who kills who, and who is on which side. Try this on your own, so you're making sense of the characters by yourself, and then compare it with what I have on the board when you return next week.

3) Visit the website I just made for the course, ______________, and view some of the film clips from Richard III, and make comments underneath the videos. Watch them with your text in front of you. The comments should reflect thought and analysis of the play and how you thought the actors/directors' choices in the films achieved meaning. I would like some conversations to start there, so will be offering some nominal extra credit for students who participate the most on this site.

4) Attend an extra-credit screening of Looking for Richard (starring Al Pacino) on Monday from 3:30-end or Tuesday from 3:30-end. Or, watch the film from 3:30-end on Monday and come to Coach Class on Tuesday, and we will read through some scenes together.

5) Watch various YouTube clips of Richard III, from various stage productions to the 1996 Ian McKellen movie. This is also a great website: http://www.stageworkmckellen.com/.

I do not recommend using a translated, modernized text, mostly because I'm finding that most students who have them rely on the modernized text and nothing else. Every student who did this failed the quiz yesterday. If you see one of those "Shakespeare Made Easy" texts at home, they can be dangerous. Students should only use them sparingly, and as a supplement to the actual text; for example, they could read an act, struggle with it as much as possible and figure out what they understand and what they don't, and then, perhaps, read the modernized text and check for any differences. They could then use the modernized text to mark inside the Folger edition, so that understanding is still there.

Additionally, using online sites like Sparknotes do not help students immerse themselves in the language, and thus are not useful in the course.


Thank you for taking the time to read this note, and please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. Students, enjoy your 3-day weekend, but please work hard if you are struggling.

Blocked sites

It kills me how much stuff is blocked at school.

At the Teaching Shakespeare Institute, we learned about a site called Chinswing (now called Voxopop.com) that let students post their voice on a website and have virtual conversations. I got the idea that it would be a great way to practice IB commentary stuff, and just wrote a grant to get some microphones and such so I could have my students start doing it.

It's blocked. Damn Bess!

Grrrrrr...

I'm going to submit the paperwork to the system to try to get it unblocked tomorrow. But I'm not optimistic. I think it would have been so cool, too!

Richard III

President Obama's Address to Schoolchildren

President Obama will be addressing school children on the importance of studying hard and taking responsibility for their own education tomorrow. Of course, it's raised one of the more ridiculous political uprisings in recent memory, and that's saying a lot. Conservatives are upset by the proposed speech, and fear President Obama is trying to "indoctrinate" the youth of America. It's just more of the product of the fear-mongering done by the right about the "scary socialist black militant" that Obama supposedly is. Socialist? He's not even liberal.

Anyhow, as ridiculous as it is, and as hypocritical the right wingers are for protesting when Bush I and Reagan both did the same sort of school address with no vociferous protests by the left, the address is still happening. If I've been disappointed by Obama, it's because of something that I knew he would do - compromise. He's compromising too much on health care, and I was afraid he might 'compromise' on the his school address. Glad he's not.

I think a pro-education message from the President would be a great thing for my students to see; unfortunately, I know of no way that my students could see the address tomorrow. There are 15-20 year old TVs up in the rooms, the product of the long-unused (at least in our school, where it hasn't been shown in at least 10 years) Channel One Teen News. However, few of these televisions still work and they're not hooked up to any cable or anything like that. I could try to show it from the Internet, but am also not sure how exactly this could work; I've never tried to use my (personal) LCD Projector for anything from the internet, and my personal laptop that I use with my LCD has never successful hooked up to the internet. So, this whole question of whether to show the address or not seems moot to me, at least in my city school. And, the thing is, I'm pretty happy with facilities this year; teachers have all been given new computers this year, and they're nice. But that's about it in terms of technology; I know of no way to show this Presidential address to my students (other than crowding around my computer monitor, which I might end up doing because it's my small class).

Frankly, I wonder how other schools might be able to show it. Do most schools have cable pumped into their classrooms? If so, why? If not, how else to show it? I can see how a technology class with easy hookup to the internet and an LCD Projector could do it easily, but that's about it.

So, in other words, it's not much of a controversy to me. I don't really have much of a way to show it, anyway. And I doubt this is the exception for many urban school districts, who are full of kids who might need to hear President Obama's pro-education message the most.

First week thoughts on 'Slumdog Millionaire' and more

One of my colleagues got the idea that we should show Slumdog Millionaire to kick off the year with the 9th graders, because it introduces our course theme of "Coming of Age in an Unjust Society" and focuses on the international issues that our course and school emphasize.

I had my trepidations because (a) I don't like to show full films in my classroom because it simply takes too long, rather I like to show scenes (particularly from Shakespeare) and do some comparison and analysis; (b) I don't like the academic tone that showing a film brings with it, especially to start out the year. However, if it helps emphasize the course theme and teach the students about something from a different culture, then it would work. I'm having them do a lot of analysis of it while they watch it, and hopefully they're not viewing it just as entertainment.

They are, pretty much, enthralled with the film, which we're going to end up spending about 2.5 class periods on. I hope it's worth it. Next week starts our short story unit, and I'm really trying to go a little slower this year with the literary devices and make sure they're learning how to read, not just throwing a bunch of stuff at them.

My 9th grade classes - three of them - are about 30 each. Not too terrible. My senior classes, on the other hand, are the smallest classes I've taught in my career; both are in the low 20s. I'm thoroughly enjoying our study of the IB Oral Commentary so far. I have 43 students and hope to achieve 100% passing for the course at its end, and it will be a challenge with a couple of them. And, I hope I push a few of the brighter students all the way up to a 7, a perfect score. We start Richard III next week and I'm looking forward to it.

Otherwise, I'm just dealing with getting my body and schedule back to the rigors of teaching. Sleep and exercise are precious commodities this time of year. I am commuting on my bike to school about half the time, but find I'm having errands to run after school sometimes that supercede biking. I'm getting used to it, though. Definitely enjoy it, especially the ride home.

"Helping Hands"

Read this article about my good friend, Kate Hooks, a Baltimore City teacher with MS.

9th grade matchmaker

The 9th grader stayed a moment after class, and looked at me, and shyly asked if he could talk to me after class. I agreed, of course, and when it looked like he was embarrassed by what he had to ask, I brought him over behind my desk and waited for what I was sure was another sob story about summer reading.

But no.

"Um, you know that girl who was sitting across from me? The light-skinned one? Well, um, today we kept looking at each other, and then looking away. Over and over again. You know what I'm sayin'? And, um, I was wondering if there was any way you could... um... help me out?"

Taken aback, I didn't know how to respond. Then he asked me for a seat change.

No, actually. I'm not going to play 9th Grade Matchmaker. But it still made me smile and I said maybe someday they'd be in the same group together for a group work assignment. And that, you know, he could talk to her after class sometime.

He agreed, grabbed his pass, and rushed out. Yup, I still like teaching 9th graders. They're still scared to death and quiet and ask for directions and do completely off-the-wall stuff like described above.

Day 1 of Year 9

The first day of school is both the most exciting day of the year and the most boring day of the year. It's so cool to meet all the new students and see how your classes are going to shape up, but so boring to go over the same rules and have a day that is almost completely teacher-centered.

It's also a pretty exhausting day. I've seen more people today than I have in many months, and that can be tough on the senses that have been dulled by the relaxation and relative solitude of summer. Also, in grad school, I remember a professor telling us that teachers make, on average, 10,000 decisions a day. "Should I do something about that, or let it go?," etc. So, my brain hurts a tad.

Still, it was a great day, a day that lived up to my expectations, and I'm ready to take on tomorrow.

I'll not see 10pm tonight, though. The butterflies in my stomach kept me awake off and on last night, so I'm going to try to get a full 7-8 hours tonight.