Mirabiliae’s blog

I just watched the video of my taped July lesson, and here are a few of my thoughts.

Class size makes a big difference. In this tape, I had much more time for informal assessment and interaction with each student; by the end of the lesson I felt that the students really understood the material I was teaching (a review of commas, clauses, apostrophes, and capitalization). The students were more involved than last time, and they all got multiple chances to go up to the board and show their stuff. I'm definitely glad I had the larger class in June though, as it is much closer to what I will encounter in Jackson in a few weeks.

I'm still pretty poised and articulate in front of the class. I speak slowly, review previous concepts, and check for understanding regularly. I'm clearly enjoying myself (mostly thanks to AW's hilarious review sentences and game idea) and I think at least a little of this enthusiasm trickled down to the students. Still need to work on the wardrobe and hair smoothing tic, however.

My downfall during this particular lesson was classroom management- ES noted this as well, and wrote me a note to that effect during my lesson. We were playing a review game that got students up out of their seats, but I definitely didn't make clear what the expectations were for this sort of activity. Was it okay that students were shouting out answers and mugging for the camera? Was it okay that students were making comments about other students' abilities while my back was turned or while I was lecturing pedantically for the twentieth time on the fate of Oedipus? (Yes, that is the ditch I am going to die in...) No, it wasn't; I could have done a much better job with the classroom climate during the last half of the lesson.  It's easy with only seven students (a couple of snaps and teacher looks quieted the disruption), but it could have been truly chaotic trying to control that activity with twenty five or thirty students in the room.

To be honest, I didn't see too much of a difference between my June and July tapes, but I do feel that my July lessons have been better on the whole than the ones in June; I've found a groove with lesson planning and feel more confident and prepared going in each morning. And another random discovery, everyone looks better in the glow of the overhead light- it's so flattering!

Summer school at Holly Springs is over, leaving me wondering just where, exactly, the last month and a half have gone. It seems like just yesterday we were all sitting in Ed building fresh from our previous pursuits, thumbing through our binders and wondering how we would manage all this. Somehow, we survived, and are now released to the real test- a whole year to be our crazy selves in our own classroom.

A few thoughts on the July summer school:

1. It was SO much more effective! Granted our English II class was significantly smaller this time around (7 versus 21 students in June), but our content was arranged more logically and the students knew what to expect from us each period. Review (definitely a good idea for the fall), Literature, Essay Writing, and the ever-popular fourth period Grammar: it gave a needed structure to the day. I need to find a way to replicate that success in the fall.

2. I actually like the 90 minute block period. There is enough time to get in a full short story and discussion, review the previous day's lessons, and really make sure the students demonstrate their knowledge of the material. It does necessitate careful planning, however, and I am wondering how I will handle this with the more cut and dry, less-room-for-discussion lessons on Latin grammar and inflection.

3. I've really grown as a teacher. Being evaluated all the time has made me aware of what I do well and also where and how I can improve. It's also been a privilege to be exposed to different teaching styles and personalities.
While I do feel that we have been inundated with loads of advice, I no longer feel the need to synthesize everything into my own method. The 'glean what you can, recycle the rest' method is working well for me, at least for now. And I can also now escape a headlock and break a board with my bare hand!

4. The people are great. The kids, everyone in MTC, the team teachers and support staff- they have made the training experience so encouraging and overwhelmingly positive. I just hope I wasn't too spoiled in this regard when I'm thrown into a new situation in two weeks.

That's it for the summer school reflection. In two weeks, I'll hopefully be organized and settled into my new life in Jackson, teaching the Latin scholars of tomorrow that veritable refrain, amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant...

Today E. and I drove down to Jackson to sign our contracts, get fingerprinted, and sign the lease for our lovely little house in Fondren.  There were, however, a few hilarious moments that I feel need to be documented.

1. My new landlord revealed this his punishment for getting kicked out of one of the private academies in Jackson was to attend the school where I will be working. He regaled us with stories of apathy (his own) and seemed to wish me luck, in a "better you than I" sort of way.

2. The people at Jackson Public Schools are very nice and accommodating, but they inhabit the most labyrinthine building complex known to man. Also, they must be destroying small rainforests in the Amazon with the amount of paperwork they made me fill out. The capstone was finding out that I had to write an impromptu "essay" on the role of teacher with respect to student discipline. As tempted as I was to write 'just smack 'em' in rebellion, the better side of my nature prevailed. Not that anyone will ever read that, anyway...

3. In my new school ID photo (which must be worn "on my person at all times") I look like I've just eaten a canary. Time to work on that teacher look!

4. I'm actually looking forward to the professional development, if only for the sheer entertainment value. Anything with the word 'holistic' promises to be interesting...

I just finished watching my taped lesson from the June summer school. While it wasn't supremely horrible, there are many things I need to work on before school starts in August.

Let's start with the least important- my wardrobe. A orange-red dress with a black sweater? What was I thinking? I definitely need to look more professional, and also need to ditch the heels that click every time I take a step - too distracting. Also, even if the camera does add ten pounds, I could stand to make it to the gym a little more often. I have a strange habit of smoothing my hair behind my left ear- it's a very noticeable tic, and I think I did it about fifty times during my lesson. Also, my arms are really long.

On to the more interesting, less narcissistic observations. I am clearly comfortable in front of the class; for the most part I speak slowly and appear genuinely excited about the material I'm teaching. I gesture relatively well, repeat directions and unfamiliar words, and am fairly capable when it comes to the pacing of the class. I can usually turn around a non-answer into something helpful, and I have an interesting tendency to give little mini-lessons on writers, grammar, or whatever comes to mind. These things are good.

That said, I could do to channel a little more of the stern schoolmarm- I always have this half smile on my face, even when students refuse to participate. I let people off the hook too easily, and then smiled at them as if I have infringed upon them. When I gave my only detention to someone who was sleeping, I smiled at him as I said, "See me after class, please." When questioning the class, I pause only for a second or two before I resort to answering the question myself (as I predicted). I follow almost every explanation of an answer with the rhetorically annoying, affirmation-seeking right? right? which I used to abhor in my teachers. I don't know how to work the overhead, I make ridiculous references that no one except the other teachers in the room will recognize (case in point- "There is a house...in New Orleans") and sometimes I mumbled to myself and then laughed quietly.

Ultimately, this was good for me to see, however painful. Next session, and certainly in the fall, I will try to be as excited about the subject while being less indulgent. And maybe I will abstain from the fried chicken for a while...

In college, I made a rule for myself that I would try to read for pleasure at least one hour a day. Although I didn't always adhere to this, I discovered almost all of my favorite books by reading outside of those books assigned for class. Vanity Fair, Bleak House, One Hundred Years of Solitude - I never would have read them if I didn't allow myself to wander aimlessly in the library, looking for the next novel to sink my teeth into. After I graduated and moved to England, the demands of my dissertation and going to the pub cut significantly into my leisure reading time, a fact I resented greatly. Despite all this, one of my most treasured times from that year is the exact moment (and I remember it so vividly) I finished E.M. Forster's absolute masterpiece Howards End. For the next week, I talked to everyone and anyone about that book- my professor, my flatmate, myself, the check-out guy at Sainsburys. On a gray day that was spitting the worst kind of English rain, that book made me feel incredibly alive again.

I think it was Freud who said that people need meaningful work and meaningful love to be happy. Yes. But I happen to need books as well. And so, in the interest of my sanity, I am re-instituting the reading rule for myself. It probably won't be an hour, certainly not the first tumultuous weeks of school. But I need it to replenish what I'm doing, what I'm putting out there each day in the classroom, if that makes sense.

So if you see me with my nose in a book, that's what I'm doing- recharging.

Angle of Repose (Contemporary American Fiction)

Wallace Stegner

I am having a blast teaching English II and III at summer school. I won't lie; most mornings I am still a little tired- late night lesson planning and poor eating habits have definitely left me desiring a few more hours of sleep when that alarm goes off at 5:45 a.m. But, somehow, the pastoral morning bus ride along Highway 7 has proved so restorative; it allows me to re-center myself for the day's teaching and activities. By the time I step off the bus at Holly Springs, I almost always feel energetic and ready to teach, or to deal with whatever might arise, be it a computer outage, white bread for breakfast, or other unpredictable miscellanea -(shoes with no heel must be bought ASAP).

Teaching has proved to be a wonderful high. Although I question having us construct these insanely formal lesson plans, ultimately I see the correlation between the time and attention the teacher puts in beforehand and student understanding. Feeling that the class is with you on a particular subject, reading to them from one of my favorite short stories, 'A Good Man is Hard to Find' by Flannery O'Connor, crashing and burning with respect to issuing specific instructions: I can honestly say that I have learned something from every single lesson I've taught so far, and most of these highs or lows were reflected in the quality and thought behind my printed plan. And although I may slightly resent the nitpicking aspect of writing plans, I can say that I agree with their pedagogical value for beginning teachers (and their effect on student achievement).

Today, during a lesson on personification, I tried out the 'cold-calling' questioning technique on my unsuspecting class. Actually, I am an enormous fan of cold-calling because I think it provides a fairer way of informally assessing student understanding in the context of an entire class. Even as a neophyte teacher, I am already noticing that my method of calling on students has developed into the classic dichotomy I recognize from my student days: either I call on the actively engaged students or those who are clearly in a different universe. There is some thought that teachers who cold call are simply mean and are trying to catch the delinquents who don't pay attention, but now that I am a teacher myself (ha, I wonder how many times I will write that this year?), I realize that, when done for the right reasons, it can be very effective.

Let me be clear. I would never cold call to be mean, and I know very few people who would. Obviously, cold calling is ideal for involving more people in the discussion, which in turn becomes more interesting as more opinions/examples are offered and mixed into the lesson. Students who would never say anything of their own accord often have the chance to surprise everyone. The teacher can take a misguided comment or even a non-response and turn it into another question, another thought up for grabs. Particularly In English classes, I see the opinion and creative questions as ideal for cold calling because, in a sense, everyone can be right. In the fall, however, when the right/wrong aspect of Latin grammar kicks in, cold calling might prove too embarassing/choppy for frequent use. You either know the verb form or you don't.

Cold calling kept my lesson interesting, and it got more students involved, with the result I definitely had a better grasp on what the class as a whole understood about personification. Minus the classic punitive bent to it, I think cold calling is one of the most effective questioning strategies, and I definitely plan on incorporating it in my classroom.

One of the more depressing moments in American nutrition occurred in the 1980s, when the Reagan appointed officials at the USDA declared that ketchup, along with dill relish and other tasty condiments, would be considered as vegetables in the meals served to children in public schools. Although these measures were intended to give more leeway to individual states in crafting their own nutritional guidelines and menus, activists and protesters emphasized the shortsightedness (and hilarity) of these proposals. Somehow, the phrase 'ketchup is a vegetable' became part of my own backtalk repertoire from an early age, and I even think I heard Jimmy Carter mock it on an NPR interview once.

A Vegetable?

I chose to read Michael Gallagher's focus paper on the history and purpose of school lunch, even though my own experiences with school lunch probably deviated from the norm. From kindergarten through twelfth grade, I brought my own lunch to school- the standard sandwich on un-chewable whole grain bread favored by health-conscious parents, carrots and celery, an apple, maybe a cookie or two. Most of my friends brought their lunches as well; our school did not have a very large lunch program, and what they did have was none too wholesome- pizza, Chocotacos, nachos, and a salad bar featuring that malum malorum (evil of evils), iceberg lettuce.

Mr. Gallagher's point that nutrition affects the learning environment is certainly a statement that everyone can agree on. Students and teachers know the effects of skipping breakfast- an unwelcome dizzy spell, lack of concentration,  general fuzziness and/or unpredictable mood swings. Regular meals and proper nutrition help keep the learning environment, brain chemistry, and even basic motor skills on an even keel. Case in point: this morning, the first day of summer school, I skipped breakfast to pace nervously around our classroom. I barely made it to lunch; by second period, I had already been tempted by the large array of scented markers.

There were two sections of Mr. Gallagher's paper that I found particularly interesting. His research regarding the history of school lunch and its modern transition to confronting obesity intrigued me for a variety of reasons. In the school where I taught last year, lunch (and dinner) were treated as an integral part of the school day. The dining hall served fresh vegetables, homemade bread, and offered many options for vegetarians and even vegans. The emphasis was on nutritive value, both in terms of time spent together and in the quality of food served.

Also, it saddens me that there are students in our schools who cannot identify a cucumber, let alone an artichoke or cauliflower. In the age of federal and state budget cuts, I don't really know how this situation might be remedied. The planting of school gardens or an increased reliance on produce from local farms? Increased awareness? I feel that there are many people, elected officials among them, who view nutrition in schools as a side issue, one to be dealt with after test scores are improved and grounds and facilities are updated. The reality is that these goals concerning student achievement could be more easily accomplished by incorporating basic principles of nutrition and putting them into practice.

I am sitting in the Ed building in front of my laptop, trying to figure out Google Docs, the lesson plan Wiki, the master teaching schedule for the summer school spreadsheet, the online version of the Mississippi Department of Education curriculum frameworks, and about a million other things that seem to have found their way onto my delightful new computer's hard drive. I am a little overwhelmed.

I'll be honest: I'm much more comfortable thinking and writing with a pad and pencil, storing my important papers in a trusty file folder. I find typewriters romantic, and still use them for my more creative pursuits. I have coils and coils of old computer cords with strange plugs and shapes attached that I have never used but am afraid to throw away. The first time I heard a computer-inclined friends speak of the operating system Unix, I thought they were talking about eunuchs. Clearly, I've reconciled myself to the fact that I will never be cutting edge in this regard.

In some ways, however, I am glad that our training this summer is introducing us to these new technologies- the fact that we can share and edit lesson plans as a community (and have them as a resource in the future) is a collaborative application I know I will come to love. But having everything online- the gradebook, attendance, teacher movement and schedule- and having it all constantly in flux and checked daily for evaluation really frightens me. There is so much information being given to us about how to use all these applications, and each time we move on to a new thing, I forget the instructions for the one we just discussed.

I'll get the hang of it eventually, I'm sure, but I'm a little shocked by how technology has passed me by while I was off studying Latin and Greek. For now, Google Docs makes me yearn for a small, quiet cabin without internet access.