What I Learned in Class February 11

 "Oh, there's a WONDERFUL amount of paperwork when it comes to RTI!"

In the Response To Intervention discussion group I was placed in on February 11, I learned the implications of RTI as far as it concerns me, the teacher, and other faculty and staff that are required for the method to work correctly. RTI is a deeply involved process that cannot be implemented in just one classroom, but rather, an entire school, as one teacher’s observations of select students who cannot meet the same standards as their peers must coincide with other teachers’ reflections of that student as well. RTI takes place in three tiers, wherein the first tier is a general education classroom, and all students who do not already have special education modifications or an IEP. If a student is consistently falling behind in his classes, then he will be moved up to tier two, where additional instruction and observation is required. That student may then move up to tier three if all other methods are not working, and this is where he may move into a special education classroom. The RTI process takes many weeks to implement – as well as a load of paperwork – and cannot just take place at the word of one teacher. In addition to the general education teacher, guidance counselors must also be involved, as well as the parents, members of the administration, possibly a school social worker, and an interventionist. In some cases, a school nurse may even be involved to advise others as to the effects of certain medication on the student and his schoolwork.

Our discussion of differentiated instruction, I have to say, was informative, if not frustrating, as this method of teaching seems to be the most complicated and in-depth process I’ve heard of so far in education school. The idea of separating all students into various learning types and interests in a formal and organized way – and in some cases even designing multiple lesson plans for all students – is just a little too much for me to take in before I have even become a hired professional. It is not to say that I am not resentful of having learned about it; I just don’t think it is a method I will be able to approach until I am much more comfortable in my teaching. Once again, differentiated instruction is something that an entire school must implement, and for a teacher to handle it alone seems counterproductive, because it is such an elaborate process and the strategies of teaching involved may get in the way of the actual lesson being taught – as I learned in Ms. Cosby’s class at Phillips Academy.

  

Differentiated Instruction

Differentiated Instruction is based on the idea that all students in a classroom are different, based on their learning styles, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, interests, and attitudes about learning. As a teacher, I should work to make my classroom as suitable to each student's needs as possible, constantly molding and refining my instruction to handle all the idiosyncrasies of how they learn based on who they are.

This is not anything new to me, as I have been learning how to be sensitive to each child's needs ever since I started graduate school. However, what I have not yet begun to scratch the surface of is how I am supposed to implement these strategies in an actual classroom, with students who are not responsive or cooperative no matter what, and an administration who keeps me to a rigorous curriculum and standards of practice. While I found Tomlinson's book interesting, I might shelve it until I am actually in the classroom, because the concept that students are going to be as cooperative with each other and me in a real, practical learning environment seems -- not to be too cynical -- a little science fiction.

One thing Tomlinson did make me very aware of is that I should never limit students to the content on the curriculum. I should make sure they understand that they are learning about themselves and how the process information as well as they are learning about the content I am teaching them. Tomlinson's ideas of allowing higher performing students to be more free with their learning while lower performing ones catch up are very good, but something she rarely talks about is the battle of self-esteem between students, and how a class that is teaching a wide variety of concepts, from easy to difficult, may alienate some students. 

"The Light at the End of the Tunnel is just the train bearing down on you"

...So says an old tail I heard once or twice before. Less than a week before the end of one of my hardest semesters yet, and I've never felt so exhausted with school work.

It's not that this has really been a particularly difficult semester, but it's a different kind of exhaustion that strikes you in a more load-bearing way -- that feeling that you've just spent five months fighting your way through arbitrary nonsense that won't make a firecracker of sense until years after you're actually hired to teach somewhere. I cannot write an Instructional Objective. I cannot write a Performance Objective. I cannot write a lesson plan without the most threatening monster of doubt shadowing my figure because I have not stood before students in my own classroom and assessed exactly what they can and cannot do.

I guess I did breakthrough a slight peck's worth this semester with my initial 50 observation hours at Ramsay High School, which I am so proud of myself for. I was very nervous when I was initially assigned to this Magnet High School with the highest of expectations for its students, particularly the AP Language students I was asked to observe and teach. I must admit I never got totally comfortable with this situation, as I did expect because I have always been nervous about doing any kind of teaching in front of a veteran teacher of fifteen years who is Nationally Board Certified and has an inherently stern approach to teaching to boot. Also, I was assigned to teach a unit on Huck Finn to a class full of African American students, and with this work of fiction being one of the most hotly debated racial novels in the American literary cannon, I was more than a little frightened occupying a classroom that reads this kind of book differently than the white suburban stomping grounds of my youth.

Nevertheless, I succeeded, finishing my hours just this past Monday with high marks and encouraging comments from my teacher, Ms. Crenshaw. And this is just to say, even though I was totally frightened with the whole experience, I enjoyed it completely -- I'm just glad it's over because it's a wicked state to carry the torch of another teacher's students.

So I'm almost done with this, the most exhausting semester of graduate school so far. With only two semesters in, I'd hate to see what lies in store for me next year. In any case, I'm sure I will feel motivated when the time comes. I just need a nap right now...

"The Least You Can Do is PRETEND to write"

Hello again from the proverbial trenches of The Blackboard Jungle.

This week: observation at Ramsay, classes at UAB, substitute teaching at Pelham High School.
I can honestly say I'm losing my patience with all three, and we'll start with the early former.

Ramsay High School is great, and I've been very fortunate to observe at a high performing magnet high school in Birmingham; I'm just ready for it to be over. I have logged about seventy hours at the school when I have only been required to do fifty. My reason: my teacher (great, by the way) only teaches English the first two blocks of the day, and while I have learned a lot from her, it has forced my teaching hours (twenty, I have to do) to add up very slowly. I keep going because I want to make sure I am always in the loop about what is going on with the kids and the instruction. I do not want to only go on days when I can teach. On days that I can teach, I love it, but still, it is usually only for a few minutes at a time, again forcing me to come the entire first two blocks, and logging way more hours than I should. It's good, in a way. While I'm losing money subbing, I'm at least learning from watching a real teacher in a real classroom.

Now, onto UAB. I think it's no secret by now that I am extremely tired of school. This program was originally marketed to me as a year-and-a-half long program, and while I never bought into that, I had no idea it was going to take so much longer than that. I estimate that I will leave this program in the Spring of 2012, and, having been here taking prerequisites since Spring '09, that comes one semester short of a full undergraduate stint. You guys need to change the way you market this program; I'm beginning to think I should have just gone for an English masters; at least then it'll qualify me to teach adjunct.

Pardon the bitterness of my post tonight; I just finished subbing a day at Pelham H.S. and boy is my voice tired. I did not yell at the students nor get mad on the spot; I have long moved past that. I am just increasingly surprised with the callousness with which students are treating me. They seem to have absolutely no respect for anything, and I am tired of being called a racist every time I ask an African American or Hispanic child to have a seat.

I know that subbing in no way reflects actual teaching. What I do know, however, is that these students are products of actual teachers, and there is absolutely nothing a teacher can do to plant a seed of respect in them. They are all just going through phases. Some of them may grow out of them; some may not. All I know is that there is one time in their life when they are destined to be brats as a collective whole, and I have willfully volunteered the rest of my life ushering them through that event. What is wrong with me?

Trench warfare, Grandma.

Late, but Getting There

Here I am, sitting in the computer lab in the education building, waiting for EDT 610 to begin, and I just remembered I was supposed to have a blog posted last Friday. I completely apologize for not posting; I just forgot. And plus, nothing about my learning experience had really changed in the week since my last post, so it would have been quite repetitive anyway.

However, this week has been a crucial one for me in my development as an ELA teacher, as it was the first one wherein I was finally able to teach in my observation class at Ramsay High School. Even though I have been observing there for the last month, I have been quite reluctant to teach a lesson because my schedule has not allowed me to observe there that much, and I was just nervous about teaching a class I could only sit in on a couple of times a week, thus getting mere snippets of their instruction and not enough to aid me in the creation of a strong lesson plan.

This week, I finally stepped up to the plate and gave them a couple of lessons on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. They have been reading this novel for the last couple of weeks, and I felt I knew it enough to take a crack at teaching it. I utilized some strategies I have learned in school to help them connect with the text better, and it felt great to finally stop theorizing and reading educational philosophy and see if it worked.

I think it worked really well. Yesterday, they had to have a lesson on the slavery aspects of Huck Finn, and what Mark Twain was trying to tell his audience in 1885 -- a time in which slavery had been abolished for twenty years -- about slavery and the lingering aspects of racism that it fostered. I had the students break into groups and analyze passages dealing with racism in the text; they had to write a summary/response as a group. I enjoyed this lesson because I was able to practically connect this lesson with what they have already been learning, an essential tenant of the 4MAT philosophy we have been learning. I was able to take Huck Finn and have them use critical thinking skills coupled with an unrelated lesson they had last week on writing summary/responses and mash them all together into one lesson. I think the students responded to it very well.

Today, I did another lesson with them wherein they had to have a "4-corners debate" on whether or not Huck changes as a character. A "4-corners debate" is one where the students break off into four centers cooresponding to whether or not they Strongly Agree/Somewhat Agree/Somewhat Disagree/Strongly Disagree with an issue. In this case, the issue was "Huck changes in his morals and viewpoints".

The students had a lot of fun with this lesson because they found themselves surprised with how adamant they felt about an issue once they had the chance to adequately research it for evidence supporting their initial views. Also, kids love to argue, and they obviously enjoyed throwing words back and forth, trying to convince their classmates. A couple of times, students actually changed their minds, and moved to different corners.

Yesterday, after I taught my first sanctioned lesson ever, I e-mailed my girlfriend, "It's great to be alive!" I love this. I wanna do it more. It's almost like a drug.

TOO MUCH FUN? (Blog #1)

Let me first start this blog by saying, Wow, I'm surprised at how much technology we are being asked to incorporate into our training as teachers of the new millenium. It is not that I am overwhelmed by the amount of work that goes into it, but it's just stunning to me how little I relied on technology as a high school student just a decade ago, and how much we are being told students need it now. I take pride in being the first generation to really use computers in the classroom, but I really wonder about the long term effects it will have on students as it is at the forefront of what they will now rely on to get them through a lesson.

Frankly, I've known how to use much of the technology that we've used so far in this class, EDT 610; I guess that is really not a testament to me, but rather to the Microsoft and Adobe suites, as they are fairly universal and come in multiple versions that are all roughly the same. I actually remember when I was first introduced to the new generation of computers as a middle schooler in the mid
'90s, and there was a practical war among platforms that seemed to be all about which corporation controlled the user rather than actually making anything user friendly.

Anyway, enough of that, and onto the questions I was prompted to answer...

This semester has been a great challenge to me, specifically because it's finally made me think hard about becoming a teacher. I was not naive enough to think that being a teacher was coming into a room blind for nine months a year and then having a nice vacation during the three warmest months. However, I continue to be surprised at how much paperwork and political correctness seriously goes into this job -- not to mention keeping a constant straight face when you find out how ill-informed and dependant some of these kids really are.

I'll show you what I mean. Here's a clip from a cool movie I found a couple of years ago before I decided to go into teaching. Initially, I thought it was funny... Now...

I am not trying to chastise, however some teachers' jobs do get called into question because admistrators confuse chastising with occupational frustration. I have just come to the conclusion that being a teacher is a full time job, even BEFORE you are placed somewhere. Before I began this program -- and, really, this semester -- I believed that a teacher just had to learn their content area and a few rules about classroom management, and then the real work came when they were placed into a job and had to figure out their own teaching method from the context it gave them.

It is not true.

More than two months into the semester, I am still surprised at all they want us to know about how to be a teacher before we even step into the classroom. I have become a very mixed bag of groceries this semester, as I contemplate becoming a teacher, and whather or not it is good for me to get this frustrated with the profession before I even get a job. I feel I need less classroom theory and more on-the-job training, which I am kind of getting this semester as I am observing wiht a wonderful teacher at Ramsey High School. I feel that is really my only source of education right now, as it gives me a practical floor with which to park myself on, rather than a theoretical platform where all is well-and-good because it is not tried.

I hope things change by my next blog, or else something is gonna give.

This is my first post for this blog. I already have a blog, which is really just a host site for my podcast that I do (or try to do) about once a month. Here I will post my reflections on EDT 610 and the other courses I am taking this semester.