On seeking out a new classroom

I suppose I've waited too long to post another entry here, which hopefully does not reflect a lack of conscientious thought on my part, but now that I'm in the thick of job searching and preparing to have a classroom of my own, unsure of exactly which challenges of teaching I'll face in whatever setting I end up being hired into--and with the additional time of (temporary) unemployment on my hands--I find myself reexamining exactly what it is I can and cannot compromise as a teacher.

The pressing concern for me at the moment is how I can/should set up my classroom. From what I understand, a large part of the school's curriculum is already determined. I've only seen the summaries online, and haven't had the opportunity to see the curriculum itself, but I'm starting to really wonder--I'm not a student-teacher any more, and my placement isn't training for me. I'm an actual teacher now (assuming I'm hired on by someone, fingers crossed). I have a responsibility to myself and to my profession to do what I became a teacher to do--teach students to inquire into literature, use literature as a tool to help them learn to think about the world around them, think about the relationship of literature and culture--media and culture, too--and become better people, better citizens because of it. And to teach them to write unabashedly and without fear and honestly and well about their convictions and what they've observed based on the world around them. If they see something amiss in the world, something perhaps that reflects an issue raised in a piece of literature, I want to teach them to engage with it, analyze it, and finally write about it so even more people can think about it, analyze it, and, hopefully, come together to fix it. To me, this is the whole purpose of art and literature--to provide us with a microscope to analyze the actions of characters, biases of authors, and compare what we see there with what we know to be true about the world, and to use that knowledge to interact with and improve our world. This is how art, at its best, has always functioned. But if I'm given a curriculum, can I make room for conversations about the purpose of literature? Can I ask students to make connections with the world around them, if there's no place for those types of connections in the curriculum?

These are very confusing questions for me, and ones that I perhaps don't fully understand myself. But I feel I need to get it together, come up with a clear and consistent professional purpose, before I step into a classroom--otherwise, what good am I? These are questions we didn't talk too much about in my teacher training (though we did read theorists who had similar questions and goals), presumably because not everyone has the same mission statement, professional purpose, conviction, or what have you. So now I find myself wondering what I can do. Is this a professional concern that I can't yet engage with, since I'm only a novice teacher and have specific teaching skills to hone? That doesn't seem like a good enough answer to me, but maybe it's the only right one. But if I'm meant to be developing as a teacher throughout my first year of teaching, shouldn't I have a goal towards which I want to develop? And shouldn't that goal coincide with what my perceived purpose for teaching is?

I'm starting more education-related coursework in the Fall, though it seems more scientifically-oriented, so I don't know to what extent it will help me work out these questions. Hopefully being hired by a school, getting a look at the school's mission statement, curriculum, and students will help me to develop my idea of what I'm striving to become, as well. We'll see, I suppose. I just feel that there's no use being a teacher if all I'm doing is teaching students mechanical skills. I feel that an English classroom is for more than that. Clear communication and reading comprehension are important skills for students to have, but isn't it more important for high school students to understand their role in the world, and have the tools to engage the world appropriately? And doesn't that require critical examination of texts, including a critical examination of the English discipline and classroom?

It's very possible I'm making too much of these concerns. I've got Harry Wong's The First Days of School sitting on my desk waiting to be read. Maybe once I read it I'll be so struck by the practical concerns of preparing for a new school year that these more ideological questions will seem far too theoretical and intangible and unanswerable to even concern myself with. In any case, any advice, thoughts on alternate purposes for the English classroom, thoughts on how to present curriculum with an eye towards critical engagement of the world around us, or any other responses are more than welcome. Also, wish me luck  in the job hunt! It's brutal out there (as if most of you reading this don't already know that!)

A Long Awaited Update

I've probably let my blogging go for too long now. However, it's a good sign. My days go so much faster now that I'm teaching students nearly all day long. I hardly have time to sit down, catch my breath, and reflect formally. Plus, between the paperwork for my placement and all the paperwork at Pitt, I'm coming to cringe whenever I hear words like "reflection," "observation," etc. It's not that I value the terms any less than I did in the Fall; I still think they're really important parts of teaching, but I'm SO busy that anything that requires any time seems like it shouldn't be a priority. But I'm having such a great time teaching! And (I know it's corny and almost ridiculous to say this) I'm actually USING a lot of what I learned last year.

The last two weeks, I've been teaching a unit on poetry. I used a music video to get students into the unit, activated their prior knowledge of poetic devices with some review, introduced them to some new terms, guided them through the first couple of poems (modeled how to read poetry, and how to take notes on a poem), did formative assessment to see what they were picking up on, altered my instruction to address misconceptions, provided extra scaffolds when needed, and designed, administered, and graded the summative assessment. It was an awesome process! There were certainly things that might have gone better. I wish the assessment could have been a bit different (My MT wanted me to design one that would prepare students for the AP test, and that would only take half of our 40 minute class period to complete), and I wish I had done more modeling/provided more scaffolds early on, but it was such a great experience! Most of the students did pretty well on the exam--some did poorly, and I have a plan to address that. But just the experience of doing all that teaching made me feel so much more confident about myself as a teacher.

I feel like I won't be perfect when I start teaching, but I know the processes I'll have to go through. My MT even pointed out that I've become really good at improving my instruction between 4th and 7th period, which is great to hear, because it means I'm picking up on what worked well and fixing what didn't work well (though not perfectly each time). And I'm learning SO MUCH about poetry and Eliot just by teaching. My students ask such good questions--they're seeing modern poetry with really fresh eyes, and their perspectives are so different from mine! It was a great unit, and now they're working on The Great Gatsby; I'm co-teaching this unit with my MT (alternating every few days), and the kids are getting into the book already. I have some really cool activities for them for next week, looking at social class and gender roles. I hope they enjoy it, and I can't wait to get to my next unit--one on research papers! I get to help these students write the preliminary version of their final senior papers! I'm so interested to see how my experience at the Penn State writing center will translate into whole-class writing instruction. Plus, I just love teaching writing projects, because student growth is so visible in those types of projects.

Anyways, this isn't the most scholarly blog entry, but it is really meant to be a celebration of my growth, which I think has been exponential this semester. Don't get me wrong, I know I still have a LONG way to go before I can qualify as an "expert teacher," but I really feel like I've set a really great trajectory. I want to share a few things that I've seen, heard, etc, that make me feel confident that I'll be a good teacher once all is said and done. (Warning: I will be bragging a little bit here!)

I heard from some students that I'm really challenging them to think in new (hard) ways.

I had a student say "thank you" to me after a lesson about part III of "The Wasteland," because it helped her to understand the poem better. I can't possibly say how much that meant to me!

Some of my remedial students in the reading improvement class are REALLY getting into their books for their independent reading. I had a student give his book talk about The Hunger Games last week, and it was excellent. He's now more than half way through the second book in the trilogy. (As an aside, our library didn't have copies of the books in, so I loaned him mine)

Some of my students who thought they "just didn't get poetry" asked some of the best questions about T. S. Eliot that I've ever heard. One student asked of the Lost Generation, "If the world was getting so much bigger in the Modern era, then why did he [Eliot] feel so alone?" Another student asked, "If he wanted us to understand what the Modern world was like, why didn't he just write a nonfiction book?" (The question was perfect coming from her, because she is the most logically driven person I think I know) Her friend and peer turned to her and said, "Because you can't convey emotion in a nonfiction book like you can in a poem." It was a perfect conversation. Also, another one of my students said of Ezra Pound, "his words carried a lot of weight," which is the perfect mnemonic to remember his minimalistic, image-centered poetic style.

I've really come to love my students, and they seem to like me fairly well, too. Oh, and I got my praxis scores back, and I did quite well, so I got a little ego boost from that, too.

I feel like SO MUCH more of a real teacher now than I did last semester. It's an unbelievable transformation and I can't say how much I love it! I hope to write again soon, with a more scholarly focus.