"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.