One Success and One Failure Story from the First Year
I am so oversaturated with reflection requests that it is now impossible for me--without some external and unrelated stimulus--to once again dredge up last years' memories. I read a Eudora Welty story about a husband who found a suicide note from his wife; she said she'd drowned herself in the river. He and a pack of friends borrowed a net to dredge the Pearl River, though it quickly became apparent that no one (least of all the husband) believed that the girl had really drowned herself. For some reason, they followed through with the charade, I guess because it was something to do. They enjoyed themselves, perhaps, but the idea of "getting together to do something" didn't justify their action, nor did it give it any meaning. They were just a set of folks doing a rather useless thing, but doing it nevertheless. On with the blog, right?
When Dr. Monroe asked for volunteers to run the summer clubs, I quickly volunteered to head up a Holly Springs Chess Club. My Simmons High Chess Club had been a big success during the year. Anywhere from 5-10 students stayed after school for two hours every Tuesday and Thursday to learn the game. At the year's start, maybe 2 people at Simmons High knew how to play chess. By year's end, 30-35 could move the pieces with some degree of authority, and 4 or 5 had become real, honest-to-god chess players. State chess competitions were always on these kids' minds--a thing which we weren't able to attend this year, but next year will be able to. The experience, as a whole, was a success (thus the blog).
The summer revealed the Holly High version to be something far different than I'd imagined: during its first incarnation, the club was 5 teachers, 1 student, and a hell of a lot of fun. Mr. E spent the 45 minutes whipping my ass, and the other teachers played each other and mentored our one student. After P.E. club was (rightly) canceled, we wound up with 7 more students and a bunch of checkerboards. The club became something I grew to hate: the students were not interested in playing chess, but in wasting my time, in leering at any females who entered, and in cursing under their breathes. It's the sort of adolescent shit that my chess club during the year did not have, because I kept the jackasses out; also, none of the jackasses would stay two hours after school to learn a white man's game from a white man. Being in a maladjusted chess club made me realize how much I missed MY chess club and how proud I was of my students who put in the time to learn the game.
Now to the failure story:
I've been told that the Delta's chemical fertilizers seep into the water supplies and into the peoples of the Delta, the effects of which supposedly explain the monstrously high early mortality rate. While the land does effect its citizens, I think this wive's tale goes wrong by using chemistry to explain the Delta's influence. There IS, though, a sort of gravitational pull that the Delta effects on its inhabitants, which changes mindsets as much as it does metabolisms.
After the last day of summer school, X, Y, and I visited a juke joint in Holly Springs. Driving east from the school, we took a right and left, drove under a (working?) railroad track, and parked in gravel to the left of the juke joint, to the left of the road. I was driving; I didn't pull into the juke joint the first time we passed it. I drove past, flipped a u-turn, and on the way back pulled into the parking lot. The shock of my first impression made me drive by and hope that, on the return trip, the joint looked different from south-to-north than it did from north-to-south.
It didn't, though. Ever read Dickens? Ever read Riis' "How the Other Half Lives"? Well, neither have I. As best I know, it's one of those books that shows up in history books ("The Jungle", "Bleak House", "Paradise Lost") but no one's ever read, though particularly influential people will have bought and displayed it for dramatic and social and political effect.
Nevertheless, I don't have a desire to read the book after having been in this juke joint (and after having taught in H-dale this year). A fat black man exhausted by sitting sitting out front; a passed out black lady in an easy chair ; pooltable, jukebox, stove, and cooler strewn inside. Ubiquitous roaches--when you move a stool, when you pull a napkin, when the black lady drops her purse on the table to make change, the damn things scamper in all directions.
They weren't the cigar-sized roaches that fly and buzz and scare the dickens out of you. They were the small, half-cigarette sized buggers that are too fast and too unobtrusive to physically represent the decay which they should symbolize. (Ever read Moby Dick? Where Melville extemporizes on the genus and species of whales?) The big roaches, while disgusting in appearance, are mostly harmless. 9 times from 10 you will catch sight of them outside, scurrying away from light or flying into your glass windows. They live primarily outside and eat decomposing plant matter. For all their girth, they're harmless and probably helpful. The little roaches, however, spell trouble. They, as best I understand, have hitched rides with migrating tribes since the Crescents became Fertile. If you see the big roaches in your house, you've left a door open too long; If you see the little roaches inside your house, you'd best check your Cheerios, chips, and sink cabinet corners. The little ones are signs of infestation, and feast on irresponsible human cleanliness practices. They're also nearly impossible to eradicate. Once you've erred in leaving week-old leftovers on your counter-top for a fortnight, the roaches will eternally remind you of your mistake (kind of like the Clap).
The little buggers were everywhere in the juke joint. We bought a couple of 24oz bottles from our strung-out hostess. The juke box ate 75 of my cents. I couldn't knock a billiards ball in a hole to save my life.
And I was viscerally uncomfortable the whole time I was in the juke joint. But it wasn't the filth, or the roaches, or the wrecks of humans serving us, or the hungry juke box, or my ten-thumb operation of a pool cue that bothered me.
After we left the joint and I had time to think about it, I realized that I was uncomfortable because I felt out of place. I was a white boy in a black joint. I had my culture, they had theirs, and I had no business pretending that the two of them intersected.
A year ago, the idea of being a white boy in a black joint would have exhilarated me; last summer's teacher corps visit to Club Ebony was a culmination of what I imagined the Delta would be about ("I played guitar on the same stage as BB King!!!" etc.). Myself especially, but many people I believe when they are in college pretend to live in a post-racial world; they (and I) not only make the mistake of thinking that this post-racial ideal can be exported, but also delude themselves into thinking that the ideal IS the real world. (is it any wonder that Barack Obama's support is strongest and most virulent on college campuses?) In college and covering blues standards with like-minded folks, a perfect pilgrimage for me was to rub shoulders in Mississippi with the black folks I'd read and sung about and listened to. What an idea, huh?
A year's reality in the Delta changed me. I don't know when, and I don't know how, but I have come to see and feel the Delta's racial demarcations. This life was for me; that life was for my students and my students' parents. Part of this is understandable: I have no business hanging out in a disreputable (even for black folks) juke joint in the same town where I am to represent the paragon of respectable education, culture, and restraint. As a teacher I know that the life I can live is circumscribed by my responsibilities to the community. In a way, we're like NBA players--I remember Charles Barkley saying, "I'm not a role model" after he'd thrown a man through a plate-glass bar window, but no matter what he said, kids looked up to him. No matter how young I am, or how I feel about it, I have to present an image consistent with...well, "the Man", if that means respectable moderation. I have no business being radical or paradigm-shifting; my actions, if emulated, need to produce results in the business world.
But the respectable/disreputable dynamic doesn't explain why I was uncomfortable in the Holly Springs juke joint. I was uncomfortable because I was crossing a racial/cultural line that I felt like I had no business stepping across. I was bucking a racial reality that I wanted to succumb to. The separate-but-equal, emphasis on "separate", had impressed itself upon me.
This is a failure story for me because I cannot cogently wrap my head around the experience. I don't know if I should be abhorred that the Delta's (and Mississippi's) racial status-quo has infiltrated my consciousness, or if I should be proud that I am no longer acting like a sight-seeing ignorant Yankee who would visit for a day to rub shoulders and flippantly ignore the painfully complex racial history of the state. And if there's a third way to see it, I don't see it yet.
I simply don't know.
Evaluating My Performance During the Year:
1. Select a "learning goal" where the students were successful. Tell why:
Participles. By the end of the year most of them could identify participles and participial phrases. Why? Because I labored with it; I spent hours and days and weeks on participles, incorporating them into a thousand different lessons in a thousand different ways. Eventually the repetition effectuated some learning.
2. Select a "learning goal" where the students were not successful. Tell why:
My students were not any good at higher-order thinking skills. Why not? Because I have not found a good way to teach those sorts of things; in order to effectively teach skills like this, one of two things has to occur. You either have to:
1. have a school that encourages outside-the-box thinking
or
2. know what the hell you're doing as a teacher.
Neither one is true in my case, so teaching integration and analysis is still not easy. I guess it's all about repetition, the same way it is with participles.
3. Give a general overview of your year in order to make sure you don't get a bad grade. Tell why:
By the end of the year I was teaching things; It took a while to establish my classroom in such a way to allow me to do my paid job. At the end, I was teaching "Romeo and Juliet", and I was (no small accomplishment) teaching it. Everything you need to know about the English language (and about interaction between people) is found in Shakespeare. To (semi-)effectively teach a real masterwork gave me the feeling that I was inching towards being a real teacher and not just another jackass sitting in a classroom to serve some ulterior motives.
Now, with my freshmen, I didn't get anywhere close to teaching Shakespeare. We were still remediating during the 4th 9 weeks: phrases and clauses? plot and setting elements? having students say, "We didn't know there was more than nouns and verbs"?
I don't really know what else to say. I've already had to write another "end-of-year" evaluation blog. I'm sort of tired of talking about my last year. I'd like just to teach another.
1. Describe Yourself as an Instructional Coach
As a coach, I like to look for little mistakes that may escape detection but will become important later on. For instance: when teachers do not verbally specify their plans for the day or their expectations of the students. That is something I think is important, and I try to reinforce it in my coaching. The students must always be told exactly what is expected of them, and what they need to do.
2. What aspect of coaching has been most difficult?
The physical exertion. Honestly, I have no idea. I can't say that coaching has flummoxed me. Perhaps what's difficult is that I don't know if i'm giving good or bad advice.
3. Describe how your coaching techniques have developed.
Um, I've only been "coaching" for 2 weeks. That's not a lot of developmental time. If anything, I've learned to be harsher with Parks than with Hayley and Jen. Parks needs to hear how bad he is; Hayley and Jen are awesome teachers.
4. How has coaching impacted my own teaching?
Well, the things I "coach" are the things I've found myself emphasizing in my lessons: clear delineation of plans and expectations, firm discipline, confident command of the classroom. I don't know if it's coming across, but I'm trying at any rate to emphasize them.
This year I gave only my own self-made tests. I do not like multiple-choice English tests: I do not see English's primary purpose--to teach one to analyze, interpret, and express oneself competently--well served by having students choose among some pre-made responses. I also love teaching grammar, and enjoy having students explain spatially the way sentence parts interact: this sort of testing is impossible with multiple-choice. I can have students identify the correct of four sentences with M-C, but they cannot draw arrows from modifiers to nouns/verbs, cordon off unnecessary phrases, and trace the causation of verbs in a multiple choice format.
I should make tests that look like the SATP since I will be teaching English II next year; I should make a greater effort to ask questions on a higher DOK level; I should probably focus more on commonly-accepted aspects of English than those that I believe are the most interesting or enlightening.
Example: I think poetic meter--and the notation of it--is what makes poetry fascinating, but the State of MS. shovels meter under the ambiguous term "Rhythm", and places no emphasis on being able to notate the flux of iambs and anapests and trochees. Perhaps I shouldn't test that skill.
At some point it's about my kids and not about me, so I'll grudgingly change the way I test--sometimes. Their tests may have an SATP multiple-choice section, but they will not be able to totally escape my goading them into expansive and nuanced written responses.
“My friend John Eubanks was a great American. He always said, ‘Give everything a sporting chance. When you go coon huntin’, either take a cross cut saw with you so that you can cut down the tree the coon is in, or climb up the tree and punch him out and make him jump in among the dogs. Give him a sporting chance.’ Many times my brother Sonny and I would make a coon jump in amongst twenty or thirty dogs. But at least that coon had the option of whuppin’ all them dogs and walkin’ off if he wanted to.”
-Jerry Clower
It’s funny; my principal is a big coon hunter. The teachers tell me that every year he shows up to school one day with a new pickup truck because he stuck his old one in an impossible bog the previous night trying to chase a coon down. When the year began, I sympathized like never before with the coon in Jerry Clower’s story. Somehow I’d gotten myself up in a tree and here came my principal to punch me out. The year’s start was rough: many a time I jumped out of the tree and was torn up by those hounds. Eventually, though, I realized that I had the option of whoopin’ the dogs, and even later on in the year I learned how to. Granted, the odds are always against the coon—and I’m not by any means a prodigiously successful teacher—but every now and then the coon steals one.
As the coon jumps, one of two thoughts can cross his mind:
1. it’s really not fair that I got punched out. I should be able to stay in this tree and live my life the way I want to. AND, even if the hunter had to punch me out, he could have given me a stick or a knife or SOMETHING to fight off these dogs with. And why are the dogs so mean anyways? Are they bred for this sort of thing? They’re certainly ill-bred, I know that much. The daddy hound probably left home when they were a little litter of pups.
2. These dogs don’t know what’s about to hit them. They’d better be in their seats and working on the bellringer when I hit the ground or I’m gonna whup ‘em all.
My first year has been a lesson in stoical responsibility. My dad used to say of me that I had a “justice problem” because I’d get myself in trouble whenever I perceived some unfair treatment of me (and of other people too, but to a lesser extent. It can’t be unusual that many of the most selfish people are also the most concerned about “fair” treatment). Throughout high school and college I was—well, to be honest—monumentally irresponsible, and always ready to solipsize away any criticism of it.
The Teacher Corps certainly hasn’t entirely cured me: far too often I leave assignments ungraded; I fall asleep at 5pm after a tough day; I eat at Sonic, unhealthily and expensively; I exercise about never; hardly ever do I return phone messages and emails; and I don’t push my students as hard or as far as they should be pushed.
Nevertheless, while my first year may have been a failure on many fronts (can you only have a Maginot Line if you also have some well-guarded borders? Or can your defenses be a series of Maginot Lines?), I am proud to have finally given up on the idea of faulting the whole world for my problems.
Certainly our students could be better parented, they could be more interested in school, the administration could be more supportive, the bell schedule could be regular, the secretaries could speak proper English, etc. etc. etc.
Ultimately, I am responsible for how my class is conducted. If the class is derailed, I did not take appropriate preventative action. If I’m going to teach my kids anything, I’m going to have to fight them and outsmart them and win them over WHILE holding them to a high standard. I’m going to have to whup ‘em all, one way or another.
What I’ve mentioned isn’t what I’ve accomplished, but thinking any other way—or blaming anyone else—is more destructive. I overheard another teacher defend his disciplinary stance towards his kids (they were overrunning him) by saying, “When they get bad, I say to myself ‘The meek shall inherit the earth,’ and then I just don’t bother with them.’” I didn’t say anything at the time (I also developed a shrewd politicism this year), but I cannot imagine a more malignant, a more cankerous attitude than this. Is this the role of a teacher, to feel uniquely persecuted and to withdraw in a monastic non-resistance? You certainly have to ENDURE, almost endlessly, as a teacher, but your justification comes not in a pious acceptance of an unbridled fate, but comes instead through wrestling oppositely-running horses into harnesses and cracking the whip.
Or it comes from whuppin’ all them dogs and walkin’ off.
Editorial Note: I realize the danger that comes with comparing students to dogs. I love my kids to death and was merely working out a metaphor. And maybe 15 of them will take Latin with me next year, which is something ANY dog is incapable of.
My first classroom management plan was nonsense. It had little association with how my class would (or could) actually be taught. In the powerpoint detailing my first discipline plan can be found a solicitation of student recommendations for authors; a one-day-then-no-tolerance policy for late work; a delusional attitude toward parent contact ("letters will be sent home before every nine weeks' exam"); and generally misguided bathroom, cleanliness, and entrance/exit policies.
The classroom rules themselves are inconsequential: Pete already mentioned that our principal passed down from Sinai a set of rules we all were to use, so the ones mentioned in my plan were still-born. Pete made another good point, that he came to rely heavily on his procedures. As did I, so they were in constant flux as I searched for a way to integrate (DOK 4) a well-ordered classroom with my innate listing toward laziness, irresponsibility, and poor filing-and-recording procedures.
My bathroom policy stands as a metaphor for my classroom management in general. In my small attempt to discredit the welfare-mentality, nothing in my class is free of charge (not tissue paper, not pens, not paper, not the bathroom, not nothin') but must be paid for with tickets. Prices inflate as the year progresses. During my first year, the easy part of my bathroom policy was the price--I could afford to be inflexible on that. The tough part was assigning a once-per-nine-weeks pass. At the beginning I gave everyone one, but did a poor job keeping track. Then I got angry at the idiots who seemingly had neither kidneys nor bladder, so my policy morphed into a "females only, and only for female problems" policy. That was unfair, and totally unable to be adequately regulated and verified. A "no-pass" policy briefly appeared, but exited just as quickly. By second semester's end, I was back to the one-pass for all rule, with all the problems from year's start as concurrent baggage.
My solution for the coming year: take the work out of my hands and put it in the students'. At the beginning of each semester, they will design an artistic bathroom pass, replete with all and sundry references to whatever they want. When they want to use it, I mark nothing down, I only tear up their pass and throw it away. The cut of the paper will have uncopiable irregularities to prevent forgery.
Same with all the rest. Students will take attendance and absences. Students will be responsible for taking a spare copy of the overhead notes and filing them in a missed-work binder. Ditto homework collection. Ditto room cleanliness. Most of my kids can't tie their shoes and would steal mine if given the chance, but a few are worth their weight in shoelaces. I gave this idea a dry-run in my homeroom halfway through the year, and I can say that since January I can count on one hand the number of times I had to take attendance or write my objectives on the board.
Granted, sometimes the attendance was wrong and the objectives indecipherable, but I wouldn't feel right in SHS with a perfect system. I'd be out of place, like heraldry on a mule.
One with a limp and with mange.
To tell you the truth, I have nothing to say about curriculum maps.
To say that they help is obvious: Karl already hit on the fallacy of strictly fly-by-night teaching (which stands in contrast to my style, which I call fly-by-early-morning).
To say that they aren't perfect creatures has been echoed repeatedly, as has the idea that this sort of thing is easy to do once you've taught the course and difficult if you haven't.
At most, I can only compare my experience last year with mine now: when Deb and Ward trotted out their curriculum map, I saw it as a super-human feat, to be able to pierce the veils of time and student-competence in order to establish a workable teaching schedule. Having seen the guesswork and fingers-crossed best-wishes that actually go into making one, I realize now it's still a sort of fly-by-night proposition.
