Lame conference

I am not exactly sure what it is, but I have hit a peak of busy-ness and exhaustion that I don't remember having hit for a long time. I have spent two nights this week at school until 9pm, a number so incredibly crazy that it's hard to even type. But it was real, and I was really doing work for all that time, to the point where I had to be asked to leave the building. I didn't quite get all the work I needed to get done completed, but I nearly got there, and that felt good.

Part of the work, admittedly, came from being one of the volunteers to drive members of the GSA to see Milk yesterday. It just happened on a bad day, being out the next day and all. We went to the movies from 4:30-6:30, then I was back at school from 7:00-9:00. Still, I'm really glad I went. The movie was really good and the kids liked it a lot.

Today was Parent-Teacher conferences, but I was at a conference/training elsewhere. I wanted to get everything done, so I could have grades posted for parents who did show up. In addition to these progress reports, my room's leak sprung again, so folks came into the room to fix it. However, since I wasn't going to be there, I had to change my sub plans so my students and my substitue met in the library instead of my classroom. There were so many notes on my door when I left Thursday night - one to the repairmaen, one to the parents, one to the substitute, and one to the parents. But I got it all done and was able to feel okay about leaving the students.

Unfortunately, after all that work, the training/conference was lame. I am ready to swear off big pieces of paper for all time. I've never used them as a teacher (do you know how much money it costs to buy one of those jumbo post-it pads? do you know how long one would last? about three classes), but am beginning to absolutely hate them as a presentee. I feel like giving us a marker and a big piece of a paper is just a sign of laziness in the presenter. And that whole thing where you go around the room and add to other people's big pieces of paper? Also lame. We did that twice in our three sessions, most of which was really lame.

I'm hoping tomorrow is better. I'm giving up my entire weekend to go to this training, and my school has invested plenty of money into it, but so far, I'm not taking much from it.

Milk, Grading

I think it's pretty cool that I teach in a school where the GSA has organized a trip to The Charles to see Milk tomorrow afternoon after school. The man at The Charles always offers us a deal, and I think it's $5/kid. They asked me to be a driver. So that's tomorrow's task. I hope it's as great as all the reviews suggest that it is; I've been hankering to go to the movies lately and the weekend will be eaten up by a Fri-Sat-Sun training/conference so my free time in the next week is zilch.

Today's task was staying at school until nearly 9pm finishing up on all of my grading. I can now feel good about filling out progress reports. Now I have to plan tomorrow's lesson. I'm so exhausted I can barely keep my eyes open. Isn't it Christmas break yet?

Bleaching the Desks

Kids write on desks. I try to stay on them, but it's sometimes hard. It's especially hard this year, when I have another teacher with a rowdy class who uses my room everyday. On Monday, she caught a young man writing in magic marker on a desk. I was already getting frustrated with all the writings and doodles on the desks - and it also includes several gang signs and callouts to gangs ("Crypt Nation", for example - but this was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I went out and bought a gallon of bleach and some Clorox bleach spray and soaked and then scrubbed the desks. By the end, they were gleaming, and the bleach got out everything but the very harshest magic marker.

Some of the kids were impressed today. Others just complained about the bleach smell in the room, which will probably be there for weeks. Still, it felt good. And I'm watching those desks like a hawk now.

*****

Pretty exhausted this week; I feel like every day is a 14-hour day, as I leave the house at around 5:30am and return after 8:00pm. Still, my To Kill a Mockingbird unit is starting off well. My goal - get kids to love this book. There are other skills goals and stuff like that, but, really, I'm feeling the need to foster a love in reading that I don't think I have yet this year.

Here's my first assignment of the unit:

MYP English I
To Kill a Mockingbird HW #1
Description of Setting

Directions: Read Harper Lee’s description of Maycomb. Notice that its tone is nostalgic, meaning it looks back at the past with wistful reflection or longing. Read it with a slow, even rhythm and notice the following:
 How the punctuation she uses (particularly the semicolons and colons) helps to create this rhythm naturally. What would the passage be like with a lot of short sentences?
 How all the details she includes help to set the scene – you can see and feel the lazy and hot summer day. What details are especially important?
 Any choices of diction that are especially striking.
 Lee’s use of alliteration, visual imagery, foreshadowing, tactile imagery, personification, parallelism, and historical allusion*
* The last line, about having “nothing to fear but fear itself” comes from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Inaugural Address in January 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression.
Mark the following passage for the above devices and details:

Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.
People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, ambled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to go see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself.

Assignment: Write a similar 2-paragraph description of Baltimore with a nostalgic tone. It should sound like it was written by Harper Lee, but be about Baltimore, with details that describe Baltimore (or the people of Baltimore). After you finish, text-mark it for the devices that you use.

Conference thoughts

I spent all day yesterday at a Baseball Coaching Clinic, something I spent $75 out of pocket to attend. I usually love it, but have been less into it as the years have gone on. First of all, it's all lectures. The guys who do it are pretty engaging, but I am not an auditory learner, and with no visuals or ability to try out the things ourselves, I don't feel like I get much out of it. I remember really loving the vendors they had at these conferences, but they only had four this time, and that was another thing that hindered my enjoyment of the event. I don't think I'll go again, at least for a few years. I'm skipping today, as well - driving an hour down to Bethesda (aka the 7th circle of Hell) just doesn't seem worth it.

The conference did get me excited about the upcoming season, though, and I spent a lot of time sketching out ideas, lineup combinations, and possible practice schedules. I spend the same sort of intensity on practice schedules as I do lesson plans, if not moreso (practices are 2-3 hours, so require a lot more planning than a 50-minute lesson plan).

I raced home early from the conference to attend an acting showcase at my school. It was really good, and I was especially impressed to hear Alanis Morissette's "Forgiven" as an intro to the scene from Doubt. That album came out when I was in high school!

Wanting to Blog Mockingbird but...

My To Kill a Mockingbird unit begins on Monday. What I really want to do is have students write about the book in something less than a vaccuum, like in a blogging situation. The thing is, I have no real idea how to do this, and I've spent a few days fiddling with Edublogs, but it doesn't seem very user-friendly and I just can't picture how it will work. I want students to all have their individual blogs but to comment on each others'. I want them all connected but independent. It doesn't seem that hard to set up, but I can't figure it out.

Grrrr...

I'm at the Mid-Atlantic Baseball Coaching Conference right now down in Bethesda, MD. Getting excited about the season, which doesn't begin for nearly three months!

Michelle Rhee

The big talk in our English Department today was of the Time magazine cover story about Michelle Rhee. Some strong language was aimed at her. She's a former Baltimore City school teacher; did you know that? I didn't.

I do not know how I feel about it all. Another thing I need to sleep on. I didn't much like the bias of the article or some of Rhee's language (wow, she really just seems like an unpleasant person based on the article), but I agree with the sentiment that bad teachers exist and it's important to get rid of them. But who is the judge of bad teachers? I've not yet heard a satisfying answer, and there are a lot I-can't-expand-on-a-public-blog reasons for my worries in this area.

That being said, this summer I got to know Peggy O'Brien a little bit, and gained a lot of respect for her. She started the Teaching Shakespeare Institute, for example. Meeting her, it was clear she has a huge passion for teaching and learning, especially city kids. She one of Michelle Rhee's chief officers, and, well, I trust her a great deal.

So... I'm not sure. I'll be watching Washington DC very closely in the next couple of years. So will Baltimore. The post-it on the Time article, written in the familiar English-teacher hand of a veteran colleague, was, "Is this a sign of things to come?". Indeed, it might be.

*****

P.S. - It's too bad you all aren't my facebook friend. You would be able to see the awesome pic I just posted of me dressed as Odysseus for Greek Theme Day last Wednesday.

Taking control of Homer

It sure was hard to get up today, but the day went super well; I meticulously planned every lesson for the week, and it's so much more satisfying knowing exactly my goals and direction than going fly-by-night, which sometimes happens. It's nice to be confident that my kids really learned and produced something today, and I know it's going to happen every day this week.

This has been a strange unit, as we are co-teaching The Odyssey with the Social Studies department. It was, and is, hard to get everyone on the same page because both departments are large and a key member of each has been out for important stretches of the unit. Overall it's been successful but it's also made me feel a little like I've been teaching without a rudder. I'm a control freak and like to have complete control and knowledge about where I'm headed with the children, specifically what my goals are. For the first time doing it, we did fine, but I look forward next time to knowing a bit more of our collective subject-related goals and assessments before we begin the unit.

I just decided to take control of what I could control in my classroom and wrote detailed lesson plans for the week. Part of it is necessity - I'm going to be out on Wednesday and Friday and needed to get my plans for my students just in case they don't have a sub (or have sweet, wan 86-year old Mrs. Mabel Smith, who wears a floppy wig and who the children take more care of than vice versa) so they know the expectations. But it was also about me, about knowing where I'm headed. It feels good.

I'll be finished with Homer and moving onto Harper Lee on Monday. Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird is like putting on a pair of socks warm out of the drier, so warm and comfortable. Yet I still seem to notice something new in this wonderful novel every year, (I'm thinking about getting this tattoo, or something like it, at some point in my life), or figure out some other way to approach it. I'm still playing around this year. I sort of want to do blogging about it, over at Edublogs. I need to educate myself more, though. We'll see if I can get it together this week; I'm hopeful that I can (too bad I have completely ridiculous, time-wasting assignments for my two required Reading Comprehension courses to complete this week, plus sit in the 3-hour classes).

Off to bed early tonight.