it means i'm too nice to them. it means i accept late work when i shouldn't. it means that it's hard for me to let them suffer the consequences of their thoughtless actions, and it means that i let them laugh in detention a little bit.
but really, i love my kids. i hate my school, my building, my classroom. i hate my paperwork. i hate lesson planning. my administration is pretty good, but i still hate the beaurocracy. i hate jbhm, and in fact, i don't even really like math all that much. but i love my kids, so i love my job. and even though for at least an hour every day i wish i had never come down here, most nights when i go to bed i'm glad that i'm here.
oh, and i can't wait to start coaching. we're already on course to snap our three-year losing streak.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Sunday, September 17, 2006
try again to post this one...
Poverty Blog
I just thought I'd start out by talking about the things I've seen in my month and a half teaching that have been exactly to the letter, like the things written in the book. First of all is the story telling. The casual register example story in the book has been played out three or four times in my class, usually I stop it before it gets too far, but it always starts something like "Maaan, Tiesha so dumb" and then continues, with constant interjections. Sometimes, when I let my students talk during homeroom, I try to actually figure out what it is that they're talking about, and I never can figure it out. There is no chronology to it, no sense of time, and I feel like the minds of many of my students are organized in the same ways that they speak - they don't have a strong sense of time or chronological order. Maybe this is part of the reason my students often seem to struggle with the idea of cause and effect. They don't seem to attach any importance to what comes first and what comes second, in discipline situations and in math problems.
The other thing that has leapt out especially clearly to me is the need to sacrifice relationships for achievement if one hopes to move into the middle-class. This is especially hard for high school students, who usually define themselves by their relationships, and even more difficult in a school which doesn't offer students any other ways to define themselves. In high school, I was a soccer player. I was a skier. I was on the newspaper. I was involved in the student council. All sorts of junk. These were all different ways that I could define myself, different groups I put myself in. But in a school of 1800, where the only extracurriculars are sports (and a fledgling "tech team"), the vast majority of the students are left with only one way to define themselves in school - the friends they hang with. To be cool with their friends, they sacrifice school. To do well in school, they have to sacrifice their loser friends.
I don't really know what to do about this yet. Obviously, more extra-curriculars would be a start. Create more clubs, teams, organizations, so that students can see themselves in a group besides the friends or the gang that they run with. But even so, sacrifices will have to be made, and having multiple ways of representing yourself will only make that sacrifice of relationships a little less painful. I wonder, though, how effective mentoring relationships can be at easing that pain. At first, it seems likely that substituting one relationship for another might be helpful, but I feel like if a student is seen to be giving up relationships for a teacher's vision, rather than his own vision of how he wants to change his life, then giving up relationships might be even more difficult. Trying to establish a mentoring relationship in these circumstances would, I feel, be really hard. But as the book says, one of the biggest factors in "making it" is relationships with positive role models. I just don't yet know how to foster those kinds of relationships.
Aside from the book, I guess I might blog about a few other things I've been thinking lately. It's my planning period, after all, and I can't bring myself to start to organize for fourth block quite yet.
Differentiated Instruction
Some students pick up things after 2 examples. Some students need two weeks. This is hard, and I don't know what to do. Teach right down the middle? Or teach to the low end? I need to somehow -
Students arrive. One wants a progress report for her Mama, even though she claims that last week is her last week of school. What are her plans for the weekend. She can't do nothing because she's got to stay home with her baby. She's failing three of her classes, mine included, but she can't seem to get rid of that smile. She really is a good kid. The other asked for a progress report yesterday, and so I gave it to her today. She's failing too. A third student is with them. They say you failed all your students. The second student pipes up
"Naw, he's a good teacher, I just be missing too many days."
"He still supposd to give you your work"
"He call me last night, but I was with my baby's dady"
(Me) "You know all you have to do is get me the work, and then I can go back into the computer and change your grade"
"Yeah, I fittnta do it. You's the only class I'm failing"
So, I got called a good teacher. Even if she just said it because she wants to pass and wants me to like her so that I'll pass her, it still feels good, after my second block tells me that I can't teach, every single day. That's where I'm having the biggest problem with differentiating my instruction. There are some students in there who never should have passed algebra I. There are some, in fact, who have still not yet passed the algebra I state test, juniors. And there are some who have already whipped through algebra I and geometry, and are ready to tear into algebra II. Well, not really, but there are some who at least have a strong fundamental sense of what we do with numbers. One who really is awesome. i don't wonder why those kids act up. I know. When I'm explaining systems of linear equations for the fourth day in a row, they are just ready to go to sleep. What is really frustrating though, is when they don't get it. When they have it, and then lose it, or when they can substitute or add equations but cannot add fractions. One girl, while good at a lot of things, still doesn't have a clue about what fractions are or what we do with them.
Organization
When the year started off, I thought I was good. I had hanging files, manilla folders, post-it notes, paper clips, everything a man could want to organize himself, right? Wrong. I just seem to always have so many things going on that I can't keep up with putting things where they need to be, never mind coming up with new places to put all the other things that I had never even thought of having to file (attendance reports, do not admit lists, I probably should even file all my late bus passes, rather than crumple them up and throw them out). Places to file transparencies, detention slips, memos... The list of things I have yet to find a place for goes on.
Discipline
I wrote more referrals this week than ever before. Two today. Plus the one I wrote yesterday for a detention skipper. Stupid stuff, all of them. I might write one more this afternoon. I need to make a seating chart, again. With big boxes, so I can put my check marks for alg II right on there. Then I can put a big S for sleeping, an R for refusal to do work, a T for excessive talking. Then I need to file away a seating chart for every class, every day, to keep on hand. So when I get those phone calls about why I failed someone's kid, I can say, well Sir, your son was sleeping in class 3 days this week, and four days last week. One of those days, Wednesday, we had a test, and he wasn't able to complete the test because he was asleep. I tried to wake him several times, and offered to move his seat, but he declined. I had spoken to him out in the hall the day before about sleeping, and he had agreed with me that he needs to do better. Then Thursday, as he began to doze, I warned him that if he continued to sleep in my class, he would owe me a detention. I woke him up once more, and then wrote him a detention slip, which he signed, and I can show it to you if you'd like. However, he has not yet showed up at detention. I believe, in fact, we spoke about this detention on Tuesday, the day he skipped, and you assured me he'd be there on thursday. He did not show up on Thursday, either, and so I wrote him up. The principal gave him a day in PAC, Friday. Friday I went to see him during PAC, my planning period, to catch him up on what he missed in class, but he refused to talk to me. I know that he has been struggling with fractions all year long, and so I had brought some examples to work with him, since I wanted to take advantage of a little one-on-one time to make sure he knows everything he needs to know to be successful, but he refused to talk to me and was exceedingly disrespectful. He said "Why you keep talkin ta me" and when I explained that I just wanted to make sure he learned the material, he sighed loudly and said "whatever" after that point, he completely refused to acknowledge my presence, so I left. Consequently, he failed the test the next tuesday with a 35%. He has also only turned in 3 of the last 15 homework assignments, and has not turned in several simple class assignments. He told me he would come after school to make up some of his poor quiz grades, but I have yet to see him after fourth block, despite the fact that he would simply need to stay in my classroom. These are the reasons your child is failing my class. He certainly is capable of doing well, he just has to make the decision that he is here to learn. I'll do everything I can to help him learn, but I will not accept anything that keeps him or other students from learning in class.
That's what I would say if I had my act together. Right now, I'd be able to say about a third of that. All of that that I wrote above is true for one student or another. I just need to get my stuff together. I need to get a computer at school that actually works too. Laptop's a comin'. Then I can grade here, put in my grades, here, and never take stuff home. Or, rather, take half the stuff home that I do take. Print off real-time progress reports, from the comfort of my own classroom. Oh, the wonderful repose that I will experience once I have a classroom computer that runs on something other than windows 98.
I just thought I'd start out by talking about the things I've seen in my month and a half teaching that have been exactly to the letter, like the things written in the book. First of all is the story telling. The casual register example story in the book has been played out three or four times in my class, usually I stop it before it gets too far, but it always starts something like "Maaan, Tiesha so dumb" and then continues, with constant interjections. Sometimes, when I let my students talk during homeroom, I try to actually figure out what it is that they're talking about, and I never can figure it out. There is no chronology to it, no sense of time, and I feel like the minds of many of my students are organized in the same ways that they speak - they don't have a strong sense of time or chronological order. Maybe this is part of the reason my students often seem to struggle with the idea of cause and effect. They don't seem to attach any importance to what comes first and what comes second, in discipline situations and in math problems.
The other thing that has leapt out especially clearly to me is the need to sacrifice relationships for achievement if one hopes to move into the middle-class. This is especially hard for high school students, who usually define themselves by their relationships, and even more difficult in a school which doesn't offer students any other ways to define themselves. In high school, I was a soccer player. I was a skier. I was on the newspaper. I was involved in the student council. All sorts of junk. These were all different ways that I could define myself, different groups I put myself in. But in a school of 1800, where the only extracurriculars are sports (and a fledgling "tech team"), the vast majority of the students are left with only one way to define themselves in school - the friends they hang with. To be cool with their friends, they sacrifice school. To do well in school, they have to sacrifice their loser friends.
I don't really know what to do about this yet. Obviously, more extra-curriculars would be a start. Create more clubs, teams, organizations, so that students can see themselves in a group besides the friends or the gang that they run with. But even so, sacrifices will have to be made, and having multiple ways of representing yourself will only make that sacrifice of relationships a little less painful. I wonder, though, how effective mentoring relationships can be at easing that pain. At first, it seems likely that substituting one relationship for another might be helpful, but I feel like if a student is seen to be giving up relationships for a teacher's vision, rather than his own vision of how he wants to change his life, then giving up relationships might be even more difficult. Trying to establish a mentoring relationship in these circumstances would, I feel, be really hard. But as the book says, one of the biggest factors in "making it" is relationships with positive role models. I just don't yet know how to foster those kinds of relationships.
Aside from the book, I guess I might blog about a few other things I've been thinking lately. It's my planning period, after all, and I can't bring myself to start to organize for fourth block quite yet.
Differentiated Instruction
Some students pick up things after 2 examples. Some students need two weeks. This is hard, and I don't know what to do. Teach right down the middle? Or teach to the low end? I need to somehow -
Students arrive. One wants a progress report for her Mama, even though she claims that last week is her last week of school. What are her plans for the weekend. She can't do nothing because she's got to stay home with her baby. She's failing three of her classes, mine included, but she can't seem to get rid of that smile. She really is a good kid. The other asked for a progress report yesterday, and so I gave it to her today. She's failing too. A third student is with them. They say you failed all your students. The second student pipes up
"Naw, he's a good teacher, I just be missing too many days."
"He still supposd to give you your work"
"He call me last night, but I was with my baby's dady"
(Me) "You know all you have to do is get me the work, and then I can go back into the computer and change your grade"
"Yeah, I fittnta do it. You's the only class I'm failing"
So, I got called a good teacher. Even if she just said it because she wants to pass and wants me to like her so that I'll pass her, it still feels good, after my second block tells me that I can't teach, every single day. That's where I'm having the biggest problem with differentiating my instruction. There are some students in there who never should have passed algebra I. There are some, in fact, who have still not yet passed the algebra I state test, juniors. And there are some who have already whipped through algebra I and geometry, and are ready to tear into algebra II. Well, not really, but there are some who at least have a strong fundamental sense of what we do with numbers. One who really is awesome. i don't wonder why those kids act up. I know. When I'm explaining systems of linear equations for the fourth day in a row, they are just ready to go to sleep. What is really frustrating though, is when they don't get it. When they have it, and then lose it, or when they can substitute or add equations but cannot add fractions. One girl, while good at a lot of things, still doesn't have a clue about what fractions are or what we do with them.
Organization
When the year started off, I thought I was good. I had hanging files, manilla folders, post-it notes, paper clips, everything a man could want to organize himself, right? Wrong. I just seem to always have so many things going on that I can't keep up with putting things where they need to be, never mind coming up with new places to put all the other things that I had never even thought of having to file (attendance reports, do not admit lists, I probably should even file all my late bus passes, rather than crumple them up and throw them out). Places to file transparencies, detention slips, memos... The list of things I have yet to find a place for goes on.
Discipline
I wrote more referrals this week than ever before. Two today. Plus the one I wrote yesterday for a detention skipper. Stupid stuff, all of them. I might write one more this afternoon. I need to make a seating chart, again. With big boxes, so I can put my check marks for alg II right on there. Then I can put a big S for sleeping, an R for refusal to do work, a T for excessive talking. Then I need to file away a seating chart for every class, every day, to keep on hand. So when I get those phone calls about why I failed someone's kid, I can say, well Sir, your son was sleeping in class 3 days this week, and four days last week. One of those days, Wednesday, we had a test, and he wasn't able to complete the test because he was asleep. I tried to wake him several times, and offered to move his seat, but he declined. I had spoken to him out in the hall the day before about sleeping, and he had agreed with me that he needs to do better. Then Thursday, as he began to doze, I warned him that if he continued to sleep in my class, he would owe me a detention. I woke him up once more, and then wrote him a detention slip, which he signed, and I can show it to you if you'd like. However, he has not yet showed up at detention. I believe, in fact, we spoke about this detention on Tuesday, the day he skipped, and you assured me he'd be there on thursday. He did not show up on Thursday, either, and so I wrote him up. The principal gave him a day in PAC, Friday. Friday I went to see him during PAC, my planning period, to catch him up on what he missed in class, but he refused to talk to me. I know that he has been struggling with fractions all year long, and so I had brought some examples to work with him, since I wanted to take advantage of a little one-on-one time to make sure he knows everything he needs to know to be successful, but he refused to talk to me and was exceedingly disrespectful. He said "Why you keep talkin ta me" and when I explained that I just wanted to make sure he learned the material, he sighed loudly and said "whatever" after that point, he completely refused to acknowledge my presence, so I left. Consequently, he failed the test the next tuesday with a 35%. He has also only turned in 3 of the last 15 homework assignments, and has not turned in several simple class assignments. He told me he would come after school to make up some of his poor quiz grades, but I have yet to see him after fourth block, despite the fact that he would simply need to stay in my classroom. These are the reasons your child is failing my class. He certainly is capable of doing well, he just has to make the decision that he is here to learn. I'll do everything I can to help him learn, but I will not accept anything that keeps him or other students from learning in class.
That's what I would say if I had my act together. Right now, I'd be able to say about a third of that. All of that that I wrote above is true for one student or another. I just need to get my stuff together. I need to get a computer at school that actually works too. Laptop's a comin'. Then I can grade here, put in my grades, here, and never take stuff home. Or, rather, take half the stuff home that I do take. Print off real-time progress reports, from the comfort of my own classroom. Oh, the wonderful repose that I will experience once I have a classroom computer that runs on something other than windows 98.
poverty book and sundry
I just thought I'd start out by talking about the things I've seen in my month and a half teaching that have been exactly to the letter, like the things written in the book. First of all is the story telling. The casual register example story in the book has been played out three or four times in my class, usually I stop it before it gets too far, but it always starts something like "Maaan, Tiesha so dumb" and then continues, with constant interjectons. Sometimes, when I let my students talk during homeroom, I try to actually figure out what it is that they're talking about, and I never can figure it out. There is no chonology to it, no sense of time, and I feel like the minds of many of my students are organized in the same ways that they speak - they don't have a strong sense of time or chronological order. Maybe this is part of the reason my students often seem to struggle with the idea of cause and effect. They don't seem to attach any importance to what comes first and what comes second, in discipline situations and in math problems.
The other thing that has leapt out especially clearly to me is the need to sacrifice relationships for achievement if one hopes to move into the middle-class. This is especially hard for high school students, who usually define themselves by their relationships, and even more difficult in a school which doesn't offer students any other ways to define themselves. In high school, I was a soccer player. I was a skier. I was on the newspaper. I was involved in the student council. All sorts of junk. These were all different ways that I could define myself, different groups I put myself in. But in a school of 1800, where the only extracurriculars are sports (and a fledgling "tech team"), the vast majority of the students are left with only one way to define themselves in school - the friends they hang with. To be cool with their friends, they sacrifice school. To do well in school, they have to sacrifice their loser friends.
I don't really know what to do about this yet. Obviously, more extra-curriculars would be a start. Create more clubs, teams, organizations, so that students can see themselves in a group besides the friends or the gang that they run with. But even so, sacrifices will have to be made, and having multiple ways of representing yourself will only make that sacrifice of relationships a little less painful. I wonder, though, how effective mentoring relationships can be at easing that pain. At first, it seems likely that substitiuting one relationship for another might be helpful, but I feel like if a student is seen to be giving up relationships for a teacher's vision, rather than his own vision of how he wants to change his life, then giving up relationships might be even more difficult. Trying to establish a mentoring relationship in these circumstances would, I feel, be really hard. But as the book says, one of the biggest factors in "making it"; is relationships with positive role models. I just don't yet know how to foster those kinds of relationships.
Aside from the book, I guess I might blog about a few other things I've been thinking lately. It's my planning period, after all, and I can't bring myself to start to organize for fourth block quite yet.
Differentiated Instruction
Some students pick up things after 2 examples. Some students need two weeks. This is hard, and I don't know what to do. Teach right down the middle? Or teach to the low end? I need to somehow -
Students arrive. One wants a progress report for her Mama, even though she claims that last week is her last week of school. What are her plans for the weekend. She can't do nothing after school because she's got to stay home with her baby. She's failing three of her classes, mine included, but she can't seem to get rid of that smile. She really is a good kid. The other asked for a progress report yesterday, and so I gave it to her today. She's failing too. A third student is with them. They say you failed all your students. The second student pipes up
Naw, he\'s a good teacher, I just be missing too many days.
He still supposd to give you your work
He call me last night, but I was with my baby\'s dady
(Me)You know all you have to do is get me the work, and then I can go back into the computer and change your grade
Yeah, I fittnta do it. You's the only class I'm failing&
So, I got called a good teacher. Even if she just said it because she wants to pass and wants me to like her so that I'll pass her, it still feels good, after my second block tells me that I can't teach, every single day. That's where I\'m having the biggest problem with differentiating my instruction. There are some students in there who never should have passed algebra I. There are some, in fact, who have still not yet passed the algebra I state test, juniors. And there are some who have already whipped through algebra I and geometry, and are ready to tear into algebra II. Well, not really, but there are some who at least have a strong fundamental sense of what we do with numbers. One who really is awesome. i don't wonder why those kids act up. I know. When I'm explaining systems of linear equations for the fourth day in a row, they are just ready to go to sleep. What is really frustrating though, is when they don't get it. When they have it, and then lose it, or when they can substitute or add equations but cannot add fractions. One girl, while good at a lot of things, still doesn't have a clue about what fractions are or what we do with them.
Organization
When the year started off, I thought I was good. I had hanging files, manilla folders, post-it notes, paper clips, everything a man could want to organize himself, right? Wrong. I just seem to always have so many things going on that I can\'t keep up with putting things where they need to be, nevermind coming up with new places to put all the other things that I had never even thought of having to file (attendence reports, do not admit lists, I probably should even file all my late bus passes, rather than crumple them up and throw them out). Places to file transparencies, detention slips, memos... The list of things I have yet to find a place for goes on.
Organization
The other thing that has leapt out especially clearly to me is the need to sacrifice relationships for achievement if one hopes to move into the middle-class. This is especially hard for high school students, who usually define themselves by their relationships, and even more difficult in a school which doesn't offer students any other ways to define themselves. In high school, I was a soccer player. I was a skier. I was on the newspaper. I was involved in the student council. All sorts of junk. These were all different ways that I could define myself, different groups I put myself in. But in a school of 1800, where the only extracurriculars are sports (and a fledgling "tech team"), the vast majority of the students are left with only one way to define themselves in school - the friends they hang with. To be cool with their friends, they sacrifice school. To do well in school, they have to sacrifice their loser friends.
I don't really know what to do about this yet. Obviously, more extra-curriculars would be a start. Create more clubs, teams, organizations, so that students can see themselves in a group besides the friends or the gang that they run with. But even so, sacrifices will have to be made, and having multiple ways of representing yourself will only make that sacrifice of relationships a little less painful. I wonder, though, how effective mentoring relationships can be at easing that pain. At first, it seems likely that substitiuting one relationship for another might be helpful, but I feel like if a student is seen to be giving up relationships for a teacher's vision, rather than his own vision of how he wants to change his life, then giving up relationships might be even more difficult. Trying to establish a mentoring relationship in these circumstances would, I feel, be really hard. But as the book says, one of the biggest factors in "making it"; is relationships with positive role models. I just don't yet know how to foster those kinds of relationships.
Aside from the book, I guess I might blog about a few other things I've been thinking lately. It's my planning period, after all, and I can't bring myself to start to organize for fourth block quite yet.
Differentiated Instruction
Some students pick up things after 2 examples. Some students need two weeks. This is hard, and I don't know what to do. Teach right down the middle? Or teach to the low end? I need to somehow -
Students arrive. One wants a progress report for her Mama, even though she claims that last week is her last week of school. What are her plans for the weekend. She can't do nothing after school because she's got to stay home with her baby. She's failing three of her classes, mine included, but she can't seem to get rid of that smile. She really is a good kid. The other asked for a progress report yesterday, and so I gave it to her today. She's failing too. A third student is with them. They say you failed all your students. The second student pipes up
Naw, he\'s a good teacher, I just be missing too many days.
He still supposd to give you your work
He call me last night, but I was with my baby\'s dady
(Me)You know all you have to do is get me the work, and then I can go back into the computer and change your grade
Yeah, I fittnta do it. You's the only class I'm failing&
So, I got called a good teacher. Even if she just said it because she wants to pass and wants me to like her so that I'll pass her, it still feels good, after my second block tells me that I can't teach, every single day. That's where I\'m having the biggest problem with differentiating my instruction. There are some students in there who never should have passed algebra I. There are some, in fact, who have still not yet passed the algebra I state test, juniors. And there are some who have already whipped through algebra I and geometry, and are ready to tear into algebra II. Well, not really, but there are some who at least have a strong fundamental sense of what we do with numbers. One who really is awesome. i don't wonder why those kids act up. I know. When I'm explaining systems of linear equations for the fourth day in a row, they are just ready to go to sleep. What is really frustrating though, is when they don't get it. When they have it, and then lose it, or when they can substitute or add equations but cannot add fractions. One girl, while good at a lot of things, still doesn't have a clue about what fractions are or what we do with them.
Organization
When the year started off, I thought I was good. I had hanging files, manilla folders, post-it notes, paper clips, everything a man could want to organize himself, right? Wrong. I just seem to always have so many things going on that I can\'t keep up with putting things where they need to be, nevermind coming up with new places to put all the other things that I had never even thought of having to file (attendence reports, do not admit lists, I probably should even file all my late bus passes, rather than crumple them up and throw them out). Places to file transparencies, detention slips, memos... The list of things I have yet to find a place for goes on.
Organization
When the year started off, I thought I was good. I had hanging files, manilla folders, post-it notes, paper clips, everything a man could want to organize himself, right? Wrong. I just seem to always have so many things going on that I can't keep up with putting things where they need to be, nevermind coming up with new places to put all the other things that I had never even thought of having to file (attendence reports, do not admit lists, I probably should even file all my late bus passes, rather than crumple them up and throw them out). Places to file transparencies, detention slips, memos... The list of things I have yet to find a place for goes on.
Discipline
I wrote more referals this week than ever before. Two today. Plus the one I wrote yesterday for a detention skipper. Stupid stuff, all of them. I might write one more this afternoon. I need to make a seating chart, again. With big boxes, so I can put my check marks for alg II right on there. Then I can put a big S for sleeping, an R for refusal to do work, a T for excessive talking. Then I need to file away a seating chart for every class, every day, to keep on hand. So when I get those phone calls about why I failed someone\'s kid, I can say, well Sir, your son was sleeping in class 3 days this week, and four days last week. One of those days, Wednesday, we had a test, and he wasn\'t able to complete the test because he was asleep. I tried to wake him several times, and offered to move his seat, but he declined. I had spoken to him out in the hall the day before about sleeping, and he had agreed with me that he needs to do better. Then Thursday, as he began to doze, I warned him that if he continued to sleep in my class, he would owe me a detention. I woke him up once more, and then wrote him a detention slip, which he signed, and I can show it to you if you\'d like. However, he has not yet showed up at detention. I believe, in fact, we spoke about this detention on Tuesday, the day he skipped, and you assured me he\'d be there on thursday. He did not show up on Thursday, either, and so I wrote him up. The principal gave him a day in PAC, Friday. Friday I went to see him during PAC, my planning period, to catch him up on what he missed in class, but he refused to talk to me. I know that he has been struggling with fractions all year long, and so I had brought some examples to work with him, since I wanted to take advantage of a little one-on-one time to make sure he knows everything he needs to know to be successful, but he refused to talk to me and was exceedingly disrespectful. He said "Why you keep talkin ta me" and when I explained that I just wanted to make sure he learned the material, he sighed loudly and said "whatever" after that point, he completely refused to acknowledge my presence, so I left. Consequently, he failed the test the next tuesday with a 35%. He has also only turned in 3 of the last 15 homework assignments, and has not turned in several simple class assignments. He told me he would come after school to make up some of his poor quiz grades, but I have yet to see him after fourth block, despite the fact that he would simply need to stay in my classroom. These are the reasons your child is failing my class. He certainly is capable of doing well, he just has to make the decision that he is here to learn. I\'ll do everything I can to help him learn, but I will not accept anything that keeps him or other students from learning in class.
That\'s what I would say if I had my act together. Right now, I\'d be able to say about a third of that. All of that that I wrote above is true for one student or another. I just need to get my stuff together. I need to get a computer at school that actually works too. Laptop\'s a comin\'. Then I can grade here, put in my grades, here, and never take stuff home. Or, rather, take half the stuff home that I do take. Print off real-time progress reports, from the comfort of my own classroom. Oh, the wonderful repose that I will experience once I have a classroom compter that runs on something other than windows 98.
Discipline
I wrote more referals this week than ever before. Two today. Plus the one I wrote yesterday for a detention skipper. Stupid stuff, all of them. I might write one more this afternoon. I need to make a seating chart, again. With big boxes, so I can put my check marks for alg II right on there. Then I can put a big S for sleeping, an R for refusal to do work, a T for excessive talking. Then I need to file away a seating chart for every class, every day, to keep on hand. So when I get those phone calls about why I failed someone\'s kid, I can say, well Sir, your son was sleeping in class 3 days this week, and four days last week. One of those days, Wednesday, we had a test, and he wasn\'t able to complete the test because he was asleep. I tried to wake him several times, and offered to move his seat, but he declined. I had spoken to him out in the hall the day before about sleeping, and he had agreed with me that he needs to do better. Then Thursday, as he began to doze, I warned him that if he continued to sleep in my class, he would owe me a detention. I woke him up once more, and then wrote him a detention slip, which he signed, and I can show it to you if you\'d like. However, he has not yet showed up at detention. I believe, in fact, we spoke about this detention on Tuesday, the day he skipped, and you assured me he\'d be there on thursday. He did not show up on Thursday, either, and so I wrote him up. The principal gave him a day in PAC, Friday. Friday I went to see him during PAC, my planning period, to catch him up on what he missed in class, but he refused to talk to me. I know that he has been struggling with fractions all year long, and so I had brought some examples to work with him, since I wanted to take advantage of a little one-on-one time to make sure he knows everything he needs to know to be successful, but he refused to talk to me and was exceedingly disrespectful. He said "Why you keep talkin ta me" and when I explained that I just wanted to make sure he learned the material, he sighed loudly and said "whatever" after that point, he completely refused to acknowledge my presence, so I left. Consequently, he failed the test the next tuesday with a 35%. He has also only turned in 3 of the last 15 homework assignments, and has not turned in several simple class assignments. He told me he would come after school to make up some of his poor quiz grades, but I have yet to see him after fourth block, despite the fact that he would simply need to stay in my classroom. These are the reasons your child is failing my class. He certainly is capable of doing well, he just has to make the decision that he is here to learn. I\'ll do everything I can to help him learn, but I will not accept anything that keeps him or other students from learning in class.
That\'s what I would say if I had my act together. Right now, I\'d be able to say about a third of that. All of that that I wrote above is true for one student or another. I just need to get my stuff together. I need to get a computer at school that actually works too. Laptop\'s a comin\'. Then I can grade here, put in my grades, here, and never take stuff home. Or, rather, take half the stuff home that I do take. Print off real-time progress reports, from the comfort of my own classroom. Oh, the wonderful repose that I will experience once I have a classroom compter that runs on something other than windows 98.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Rescue Plan
So, it's been a while since I wrote a blog. The only reason I'm writing one right now is because I've resigned myself to the fact that I won't get anything like the amount of sleep I want to get tonight. So if I'm up for 15 more minutes because of a blog, what difference does that really make anyway? I know, though, that in the morning those extra 15 minutes will seem so valuable.
Anyway, reading Merideth's blog and talking to some other second years, I realize that my position is in fact the norm for first year teachers. I'm doing ok. Yes, some days are bad. Most days are bad. My Algebra II class is almost always bad. But I can work through it. Not in the sense that I can just talk louder than my kids and expect them to learn. I tried that, and it didn't work. At all. But in the sense that I can change things. I can turn enjoy my second block class as much as my fourth, I just have to crack down on them first.
Really, that Algebra II class is difficult. The talking, the disrespect. The paper throwing. Eating. Talking back. Refusing to do work. Then, they say "Mr. G, you don't know how to teach this stuff." or "Mr. G, you just don't teach. You just be expecting us to do this stuff, and you ain't never taught it to us." Yes, I taught it. You were just shouting back and forth with someone across the room. The next time I taught it, you were throwing paper. The third time, you were asleep (and drooling) and the fourth time I taught it, you were stabbing someone with a pencil. One student actually dropped my class to take Algebra II with another teacher. She told me she wasn't learning anything in here. Most of my remaining students have told me that they'd like to get out like she did, into the other teacher's class.
But I realized, in a sense, that the students were all right. If I can't control my classroom, and if I can't get students to listen, then it doesn't matter what I say, what I write on the board, or what I plan - I am a bad teacher. At least as far as those students are concerned. They aren't getting anything out of my class except frustration. If they were learning something, then fine, I could deal with the noise and chaos, but, of course, no one learns anything in that kind of situation, except how to avoid getting caught with his hot cheetos.
I dropped in on a colleague's class yesterday. This is my worst block, she told me. The students were all sitting. They were all silent. Even when she was at the door talking with me. They all appeared, at least at first glance, to be working. I can't wait until I can call a class like that my worst class.
Right now, that algebra II class is my worst class. I've spent the night not planning, not grading (grades are due by the end of the day tomorrow and I have not done any planning yet for tomorrow), but trying to come up with a rescue plan for my second block Algebra II. New rules, new consequences. New seating (still working on that). Tomorrow, I'm going to take my plan to my principal if she has time, if not to my mentor teacher. I'll tack it onto the bottom of this post, please leave some feedback. The big thing is not, of course, the plan, but sticking to it. I've been sticking to my tardy policy pretty well, and that hasn't been much of a problem, but everything else I've been too lax on. How, for example, could I have gone until today without calling my loudest student's mother?
I guess, because I've been absolutely exhausted, all the time. There's another thing I need to work on - reducing my workload, especially grading. I've been assigning and collecting homework every day except Friday, and I've been having a quiz in each of my classes every day. Quite often we do classwork, and I tell them I'll take that up too. Usually, I throw the classwork out once they leave, but I'm grading and recording 50-60 quizzes and 30-40 homework assignments every night. Or I should be. Half of it gets shunted off to the weekend. Plus, with the block schedule, I should be busting through two units every three weeks, so that means a test most weeks. I just need to find a way to do less of that. Having the kids grade their own things is one option, but it's really not very appealing. Maybe I'll start making scantrons for the benchmarks. Give everyone one scantron for the week, and then run it through at the end of the week. But ideally I want them to be getting benchmarks the next day, because I want them to know how they did, so that they'll have a chance to make it up if they want / need to.
Anyway, here's my draft of my rescue plan. Good night.
Anyway, reading Merideth's blog and talking to some other second years, I realize that my position is in fact the norm for first year teachers. I'm doing ok. Yes, some days are bad. Most days are bad. My Algebra II class is almost always bad. But I can work through it. Not in the sense that I can just talk louder than my kids and expect them to learn. I tried that, and it didn't work. At all. But in the sense that I can change things. I can turn enjoy my second block class as much as my fourth, I just have to crack down on them first.
Really, that Algebra II class is difficult. The talking, the disrespect. The paper throwing. Eating. Talking back. Refusing to do work. Then, they say "Mr. G, you don't know how to teach this stuff." or "Mr. G, you just don't teach. You just be expecting us to do this stuff, and you ain't never taught it to us." Yes, I taught it. You were just shouting back and forth with someone across the room. The next time I taught it, you were throwing paper. The third time, you were asleep (and drooling) and the fourth time I taught it, you were stabbing someone with a pencil. One student actually dropped my class to take Algebra II with another teacher. She told me she wasn't learning anything in here. Most of my remaining students have told me that they'd like to get out like she did, into the other teacher's class.
But I realized, in a sense, that the students were all right. If I can't control my classroom, and if I can't get students to listen, then it doesn't matter what I say, what I write on the board, or what I plan - I am a bad teacher. At least as far as those students are concerned. They aren't getting anything out of my class except frustration. If they were learning something, then fine, I could deal with the noise and chaos, but, of course, no one learns anything in that kind of situation, except how to avoid getting caught with his hot cheetos.
I dropped in on a colleague's class yesterday. This is my worst block, she told me. The students were all sitting. They were all silent. Even when she was at the door talking with me. They all appeared, at least at first glance, to be working. I can't wait until I can call a class like that my worst class.
Right now, that algebra II class is my worst class. I've spent the night not planning, not grading (grades are due by the end of the day tomorrow and I have not done any planning yet for tomorrow), but trying to come up with a rescue plan for my second block Algebra II. New rules, new consequences. New seating (still working on that). Tomorrow, I'm going to take my plan to my principal if she has time, if not to my mentor teacher. I'll tack it onto the bottom of this post, please leave some feedback. The big thing is not, of course, the plan, but sticking to it. I've been sticking to my tardy policy pretty well, and that hasn't been much of a problem, but everything else I've been too lax on. How, for example, could I have gone until today without calling my loudest student's mother?
I guess, because I've been absolutely exhausted, all the time. There's another thing I need to work on - reducing my workload, especially grading. I've been assigning and collecting homework every day except Friday, and I've been having a quiz in each of my classes every day. Quite often we do classwork, and I tell them I'll take that up too. Usually, I throw the classwork out once they leave, but I'm grading and recording 50-60 quizzes and 30-40 homework assignments every night. Or I should be. Half of it gets shunted off to the weekend. Plus, with the block schedule, I should be busting through two units every three weeks, so that means a test most weeks. I just need to find a way to do less of that. Having the kids grade their own things is one option, but it's really not very appealing. Maybe I'll start making scantrons for the benchmarks. Give everyone one scantron for the week, and then run it through at the end of the week. But ideally I want them to be getting benchmarks the next day, because I want them to know how they did, so that they'll have a chance to make it up if they want / need to.
Anyway, here's my draft of my rescue plan. Good night.
Mr. G’s Algebra II class will follow a new set of rules, starting Friday, September 15, 2006. These rules are being put in place because the classroom has become so noisy, distracting, and disrespectful that it is very difficult for students to learn. Every student in the class is capable of learning the material, if provided with a positive, orderly learning environment. These rules seek to establish such an environment for all students in the class.
New Rules
- No eating, sleeping or throwing paper.
- Raise your hand every time you wish to speak. Do not speak to another student unless you have explicit permission from Mr. Gallagher.
- Be respectful at all times. Being respectful means following all directions the first time they are given. Being respectful means putting forth your best effort during all class work and class activities. Students should be respectful in everything they do, from their speech and work habits to their body language. If I am giving a student instructions and they sigh or shrug their shoulders disrespectfully, this will also lead to a consequence.
New Consequences
A student will receive one warning for all rules. Anything after a warning and the student will complete a one-page writing assignment specific to the rule you broke. Additional infractions will lead to additional pages. A student will not be asked to write more than 5 pages – if he breaks the rules more than five times during a class, the student will be sent out.
In addition, any food brought into the classroom by a student will be confiscated immediately. If the student refuses to hand over the food, he or she will receive an immediate office referral.
Writing Assignment
First Page
- What rule did you break?
- What were your reasons for breaking it?
- What will you do differently next time?
Second – Fifth Pages
- Copy terms from the glossary in the back of the Algebra II book.
If you fail to turn in your writing assignment the next day, you will have detention for the next Tuesday or Thursday. If you fail to show up at detention, I’ll call your parents and assign you the next detention. If you skip that detention, I will write you up. At this point, you will have had five chances to do the right thing. If you are written up, it will be no one’s fault but your own.
I want to ensure that our classroom is a place where students are able to learn. Any action that makes it difficult for students to learn is completely unacceptable and will not be tolerated.
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