Week 12
Although I had spring break a couple of weeks back, I still feel like I could use another break. Full-time teaching is in full swing, and it is a very exhausting and challenging. There's some classes where I feel good about my teaching and other times where I feel like I have failed them. This past week was a bit of a struggle for me mentally, because I had the realization of the overwhelming work I had to get done before I go to bed each night. Sometimes, this means that I go to bed much later than usual so I can get all of the work done. Also, while I've already read the novel that I'm teaching my junior classes, The Catcher in the Rye, I have to keep up with the readings as they are reading it. For instance, on Monday, they have a quiz on Chapters 10-12, so this weekend, I read over those chapters again to prepare myself. Overall, the week was fine, but I am having trouble keeping up with the crazy schedule and a group of unmotivated students. It's been a blessing and a curse being the full time teacher, but I know I have to keep running the race. My role is changing, and it's been a journey to process through it.
I set some goals a couple of weeks ago, and here is where I am in meeting them. My first goal was to grade as many papers as possible. The students finished writing their The Great Gatsby papers, and over spring break, my main goal was to grade them. But, when you have about 75 students, it can be overwhelming. When I asked my teacher how long it usually takes her to grade one paper, she said it could take anywhere from 15-20 minutes to read over it, leave comments, and fill out the grading rubric. It took me approximately 20 minutes to grade each paper at a time, and I didn't start grading until the Thursday of that week. By the time school started up again, I had only finished grading 2 out of 3 classes' papers. One thing that I have learned about grading papers is that it is important to space out grading them so that you are not stressed later. Tomorrow, I plan on handing back the papers and putting the grades in. Hopefully, my students understand why they were given the grade they received. The unfortunate situation is that some students misunderstood the prompt or did not organize their paper well. So, points were taken off. Some ideas were very insightful, but I could not give them full points, because they were lacking in other areas.
My other goal was to successfully plan my units. Unfortunately, this goal of mine failed, because I spent too much time trying to grade the rest of the papers. I did finish reading at least one of the books that I would be teaching, but as far as creating a unit plan, I was unsuccessful. For my Senior Basic English class, I decided not to make a unit plan, because it is a class with which it is necessary to take it day by day. Almost every single day, the class will be off task, and it is nearly impossible to get through every thing that you wish to in a period. So, as I go into this next week, I will plan for my lessons for Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at the beginning of this week. It will be a very basic plan until the night before teaching a lesson. Thankfully, I know which chapters I want to cover for each day, so it will just be a matter of figuring out how to teach it effectively.
This week, I taught 4 lessons on The Catcher in the Rye. We officially started the book this week, which I was very excited about, but some of my juniors were frustrated that we were getting right into it after coming back from break. To introduce my unit, I first started out by giving them an inc-class journal entry. The prompt was, "When you see injustice in the world, what would you do about it?" I had to explain what injustice was, but once I set clear expectations and gave time, the students were writing about it. For a solid 10 minutes, there was nothing but the sound of students typing or writing on a sheet of paper. First period was a bit more of a struggle, because I did not set the clearest of expectations. Period 3 and Period 6 nailed the prompt after I explained that I wanted them to give me a personal experience of them dealing with or seeing injustice. Afterwards, we had a discussion about what they wrote. Later, I transitioned into how that question fit in with the theme of the book. Here are a few responses that really captured my attention.
The rest of the week, I proceeded to assign chapters for my students to read and the next day in class, they would have a quiz and discussion of the chapters. Typically, this is how each review of the chapters would go. The quizzes are simply for comprehension to keep them accountable in their reading. Each day, I would try to add some new element to make the discussion more interesting and to also keep my students engaged.
For one class session, I used PollEverywhere. This is an online application where students can type in a code on their phones and answer a question that I put on a screen. I made it anonymous so that the students would feel comfortable sharing without having to be judged by other peers, but I did expect that every single student contribute. It kept them engaged in the discussion, and allowed me to see what they were generally thinking about my open-ended questions. For the most part, the reception was great, and it made the conversation interesting. I definitely plan on using this for other lessons.
Another piece of technology that I used was the Virtual Board, which I have actually used in the past. It worked decently well for a couple of my classes, but it did not work well for my last period, because I did not set clear expectations. Before I had them fill out the Virtual Board, I had them listen to a song called "Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?" by Green Day (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R90ouXVTWHM). Since we were learning more about the main character, Holden, in reading the chapters, I wanted to see them connect lyrics from the song to passages from the text. Some classes were more successful with this task than others, but it was encouraging to see how well they could make connections. Unfortunately, I shouldn't have split them up into small groups, because some students were done faster than others, so they spent the rest of the time talking to each other or on their phones. While it was a successful technology integration, I am not sure if I will use the Virtual Board again. The students aren't a big fan of it because of the formatting, but I'm also sensing that they may be rebelling against it, because they are lazy. We will see.
Teaching high school has truly been one of the most difficult experiences of my life, because I know that I was not meant to teach students at this age, and patience is extremely hard to come by with this vocation. Another thing is that I am having trouble incorporating strategies and activities that will spur intrinsic motivation, but is ultimately appropriate for high schoolers. My cooperating teacher gave me many different books with worksheets and activities, so I will take a look at that and see what would be best for my class. Incorporating unique strategies is something that I will continue to work on. In the end, it was an exhausting week for me, but I am hoping that I can come into this week more energized and eager to learn from my students.
My goal for next week:
1. Make sure students have their books out on their desks.
2. Facilitate rather than lead the discussion.
3. Set clear expectations.
Classroom Confidential
For this week we were to read Schmidt Chapter 10 answering "What's the big deal about social justice? What are the ideas of chapter 10 important for a Christian teacher?"
This chapter actually perfectly fits with one of my main themes that I taught about earlier in the week. The journal entries that my students wrote allowed them to explore their views on social issues and not just "leave their life experiences at the door every morning." As I introduced this prompt to them, I gave them the example of the Parkland, Florida shooting that just recently occurred almost a couple of months ago. I wanted to emphasize to my students to reflect on their own personal experiences. This goes along with the school skills and life skills reflected in this chapter. Using writing, critical thinking, and learning from their own experience can help them look at other real life problems and make some sort of resolution to the problem. It also brings them awareness in a time when there is so much darkness and hurt in our community. From teaching them about social justice and enabling them to reflect on these issues, they are becoming life long learners and see their potential to make a difference in a broken world.
As a Christian teacher, I can't simply say that my views are the right views, but it is necessary for me to encourage my students to share them and get them talking or writing. Also, it is important for me to support them and let them know that I am hearing them. One of the greatest things about being an English teacher is hearing different perspectives and multiple interpretations. Literature isn't clear cut; it's something that requires connections and creating unique ideas based on what we read. I don't want my students to feel limited; I want them to discover what they believe about issues and seek to resolve it. They can compare themselves to Holden in The Cather in the Rye. He doesn't do anything when he sees injustice in the world, but what can my students do to right that wrong. What will they do about it? Whatever they do, I want to emphasize that they should not only seek what is right and true, but they must do it in love, otherwise, more injustice will continue to snowball until we suffer from an uncontrollable blizzard.
I set some goals a couple of weeks ago, and here is where I am in meeting them. My first goal was to grade as many papers as possible. The students finished writing their The Great Gatsby papers, and over spring break, my main goal was to grade them. But, when you have about 75 students, it can be overwhelming. When I asked my teacher how long it usually takes her to grade one paper, she said it could take anywhere from 15-20 minutes to read over it, leave comments, and fill out the grading rubric. It took me approximately 20 minutes to grade each paper at a time, and I didn't start grading until the Thursday of that week. By the time school started up again, I had only finished grading 2 out of 3 classes' papers. One thing that I have learned about grading papers is that it is important to space out grading them so that you are not stressed later. Tomorrow, I plan on handing back the papers and putting the grades in. Hopefully, my students understand why they were given the grade they received. The unfortunate situation is that some students misunderstood the prompt or did not organize their paper well. So, points were taken off. Some ideas were very insightful, but I could not give them full points, because they were lacking in other areas.
My other goal was to successfully plan my units. Unfortunately, this goal of mine failed, because I spent too much time trying to grade the rest of the papers. I did finish reading at least one of the books that I would be teaching, but as far as creating a unit plan, I was unsuccessful. For my Senior Basic English class, I decided not to make a unit plan, because it is a class with which it is necessary to take it day by day. Almost every single day, the class will be off task, and it is nearly impossible to get through every thing that you wish to in a period. So, as I go into this next week, I will plan for my lessons for Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at the beginning of this week. It will be a very basic plan until the night before teaching a lesson. Thankfully, I know which chapters I want to cover for each day, so it will just be a matter of figuring out how to teach it effectively.
This week, I taught 4 lessons on The Catcher in the Rye. We officially started the book this week, which I was very excited about, but some of my juniors were frustrated that we were getting right into it after coming back from break. To introduce my unit, I first started out by giving them an inc-class journal entry. The prompt was, "When you see injustice in the world, what would you do about it?" I had to explain what injustice was, but once I set clear expectations and gave time, the students were writing about it. For a solid 10 minutes, there was nothing but the sound of students typing or writing on a sheet of paper. First period was a bit more of a struggle, because I did not set the clearest of expectations. Period 3 and Period 6 nailed the prompt after I explained that I wanted them to give me a personal experience of them dealing with or seeing injustice. Afterwards, we had a discussion about what they wrote. Later, I transitioned into how that question fit in with the theme of the book. Here are a few responses that really captured my attention.
"Most people claim when they see an injustice taking place, they would immediately stand up and protect the victim. However, for some, this is just all talk. Throughout my life the number of injustices I have witnessed due to religion is truly unbelievable. I grew up watching people attacking, whether verbally or physically, my family and friends. Being muslim definitely has its challenges. The amount of times my friends and I, or even my mother and I are walking in any public place--the mall, grocery store, parking lot, etc.-- we are called terrorists and told to go back to our country. In these situations I always have to reply and stand up for myself and what I believe in because if you don't they think you're weak."
"Many people see this and don’t stand up because, they don’t want be looked at poorly. Which is also why I choose not to talk about this aloud. I have very strong opinions and a lot of facts to back this up. Life is full of facts. All I want in life is to maybe one day be able to come out of my shell and speak out. Yet I look at all the people in the world that look down upon people like me who stick up for others that aren’t like those who experience the Injustice. Yet little did everyone know all the guys I hang out with do experience these problems. I read the news all the time and yes I do watch the news at the age of 17. I’m a little different from everyone else. I go home and play video games until really late nights and or early mornings. Do I enjoy being made fun of and or enjoy not being treated like a normal person, no. Yet, i’m grateful that I experience this versus other things like some of the people I talk to greatly. Nobody deserves to be treated like dirt and or be scared if they are going to make it through the day."
"When I see injustice in the world, I tend to stay out of it. I'm not going to make up some heroic “I would chime in and tell off those who are being unjust and help those being treated poorly!” Because 90% of everyone writing this paper is saying that, in reality about a good 15% will actually do something. I don't take sides or intervene, it's not my business so I simply don't care. Is this the best outlook? No. But it's the most human response."My students blew me away with these responses, and I think it was because they were very personal responses to a prompt. According to IPTS Performance Standard 1L, the competent teacher, "uses information about students’ individual experiences, families, cultures, and communities to create meaningful learning opportunities and enrich instruction for all students." Writing about this allowed them to reflect on their experiences and connect it to the content. While some students did not take the prompt seriously, others were open and honest which gave me better hope for these students' futures. They may not always show motivation or interest in school, but it's encouraging to know that they have strong values. Because I did not judge their responses and basically told them to "come as they are," I really feel like I have grown more in showing justice in diversity. In an English class where interpretation is supposed to be guaranteed, sometimes, their own voices are halted by the overarching, predetermined themes within the novel. With journal entries, their voices can be heard without restraint by grammar, focus, or formal tone. I believe that giving them this opportunity to come as they are allowed them to be more free with their response and enabled me to show the support that I have always had for them.
The rest of the week, I proceeded to assign chapters for my students to read and the next day in class, they would have a quiz and discussion of the chapters. Typically, this is how each review of the chapters would go. The quizzes are simply for comprehension to keep them accountable in their reading. Each day, I would try to add some new element to make the discussion more interesting and to also keep my students engaged.
For one class session, I used PollEverywhere. This is an online application where students can type in a code on their phones and answer a question that I put on a screen. I made it anonymous so that the students would feel comfortable sharing without having to be judged by other peers, but I did expect that every single student contribute. It kept them engaged in the discussion, and allowed me to see what they were generally thinking about my open-ended questions. For the most part, the reception was great, and it made the conversation interesting. I definitely plan on using this for other lessons.
Another piece of technology that I used was the Virtual Board, which I have actually used in the past. It worked decently well for a couple of my classes, but it did not work well for my last period, because I did not set clear expectations. Before I had them fill out the Virtual Board, I had them listen to a song called "Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?" by Green Day (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R90ouXVTWHM). Since we were learning more about the main character, Holden, in reading the chapters, I wanted to see them connect lyrics from the song to passages from the text. Some classes were more successful with this task than others, but it was encouraging to see how well they could make connections. Unfortunately, I shouldn't have split them up into small groups, because some students were done faster than others, so they spent the rest of the time talking to each other or on their phones. While it was a successful technology integration, I am not sure if I will use the Virtual Board again. The students aren't a big fan of it because of the formatting, but I'm also sensing that they may be rebelling against it, because they are lazy. We will see.
Teaching high school has truly been one of the most difficult experiences of my life, because I know that I was not meant to teach students at this age, and patience is extremely hard to come by with this vocation. Another thing is that I am having trouble incorporating strategies and activities that will spur intrinsic motivation, but is ultimately appropriate for high schoolers. My cooperating teacher gave me many different books with worksheets and activities, so I will take a look at that and see what would be best for my class. Incorporating unique strategies is something that I will continue to work on. In the end, it was an exhausting week for me, but I am hoping that I can come into this week more energized and eager to learn from my students.
My goal for next week:
1. Make sure students have their books out on their desks.
2. Facilitate rather than lead the discussion.
3. Set clear expectations.
Classroom Confidential
For this week we were to read Schmidt Chapter 10 answering "What's the big deal about social justice? What are the ideas of chapter 10 important for a Christian teacher?"
This chapter actually perfectly fits with one of my main themes that I taught about earlier in the week. The journal entries that my students wrote allowed them to explore their views on social issues and not just "leave their life experiences at the door every morning." As I introduced this prompt to them, I gave them the example of the Parkland, Florida shooting that just recently occurred almost a couple of months ago. I wanted to emphasize to my students to reflect on their own personal experiences. This goes along with the school skills and life skills reflected in this chapter. Using writing, critical thinking, and learning from their own experience can help them look at other real life problems and make some sort of resolution to the problem. It also brings them awareness in a time when there is so much darkness and hurt in our community. From teaching them about social justice and enabling them to reflect on these issues, they are becoming life long learners and see their potential to make a difference in a broken world.
As a Christian teacher, I can't simply say that my views are the right views, but it is necessary for me to encourage my students to share them and get them talking or writing. Also, it is important for me to support them and let them know that I am hearing them. One of the greatest things about being an English teacher is hearing different perspectives and multiple interpretations. Literature isn't clear cut; it's something that requires connections and creating unique ideas based on what we read. I don't want my students to feel limited; I want them to discover what they believe about issues and seek to resolve it. They can compare themselves to Holden in The Cather in the Rye. He doesn't do anything when he sees injustice in the world, but what can my students do to right that wrong. What will they do about it? Whatever they do, I want to emphasize that they should not only seek what is right and true, but they must do it in love, otherwise, more injustice will continue to snowball until we suffer from an uncontrollable blizzard.
Sarah, as a former middle grades English teacher, I can empathize with you somewhat about the load. It is a lot of work to teach English, especially when you have to do all the grading. I saved my own sanity by using different kinds of grading for different kinds of assignments. For some work, I did what you're doing, took lots of time for each paper and wrote lots of comments, but for other work, I simply read it and assigned a score. I found that when rewriting was expected, you do need to give the right feedback, but sometimes when rewriting is not expected, all students care about is the score anyway.
ReplyDeleteYou say you aren't meant to teach high school students, but I see some great things that you are doing with these students in the ways in which you get them to respond and think deeply. Right the work load is clouding your perception, but I'm hoping that in a couple more weeks, you'll see more of the rewards.