The Changes I've Seen: Being a "Real Teacher"

It has been a very long time since I've written. I'll explain briefly that life threw me a few monkey wrenches that got in the way of my teaching career and I was out of the field for a couple of years. Now, I find myself back in a teaching position and the time away has definitely meant some perspective shifts. I was just re-reading some old blog entries and some of them seem naive, but some of them make me long for the days when I saw teaching as a really, truly noble calling and a public service. Lately, I've just been seeing it as a job.

So I want to resurrect this blog and get myself thinking and, hopefully, talking about teaching on a more critical level again. For right now, I'll just start out with a brief description of my current teaching situation.

In September of this year, I accepted a long-term substitute position teaching ninth-grade English for an online charter school. My sections are asynchronous, which means that the students work at their own pace on pre-designed units. All of their readings and assignments are designated in the curriculum and can't be altered. However, I teach each section once each week. The purpose of these "live session" each week is to reinforce skills that are missing in the curriculum and to provide extra help to struggling students. I can basically teach anything I want in these lessons as long as it doesn't directly reference anything in the students' independently-paced curriculum (since the units/lessons can be completed in any order the students want), and as long as it reinforces the PA Common Core standards--in particular, the ones that the pre-designed curriculum addresses the least.

There are a lot of challenges that go along with this kind of teaching, but there are benefits as well. One benefit is that I have a tremendous amount of non-instructional time in my day. I teach six sections a week, at one hour each, so that's six hours a week of instruction. This means I have a great deal of time to offer tutoring (that students rarely take advantage of), contact students and parents, plan my lessons, etc.

I also work for a district that I've found phenomenal at respecting and acknowledging teachers. There is a great opportunity for collaboration. I am free to seek advice from academic advisers, my supervisor, and my peers. Everyone who I've approached and asked for guidance has been truly helpful.

Still, there are challenges. Since the students only meet once a week, there is little sense of community. Since they are coming to class online, it's often challenging to gauge their level of engagement. And since I don't have control over their assignments and can't refer to the reading materials in the unit, I have a difficult time connecting the lessons to one another or making the classes seem relevant at all.

I also have a big mix of ability levels in my classes. Most of the high-achievers (as measured by their grades and their pacing) do not attend. Students with high scores and who are on pace are exempt from the lessons. Still, some of those A students do come to class. I also have students who have yet to start their independent work. Some students are failing in a major way. Some students have reading disabilities. It's hard to plan relevant instruction for all students.

Anyways, I have a lot of questions as a first-year teacher in a new environment. I'd love as much feedback as possible. My goal is to make my instruction both effective and relevant to all students. I don't know if I'll ever get there, but this is the beginning of my attempt, and I could use all the help I can get!

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.

Half Way to Real Teacher-hood: Where I'm Headed

So, taking into consideration all of the questions--both theoretical and practical, both general to education and specific to my own placement and practice; what I've written about in my final reflections for various courses at Pitt and what I've written in my blog along the way--I'm looking ahead to my semester of full-time student-teaching and trying to take into consideration what I've learned from my experiences thus far.

All I know for sure is that I'll start teaching lessons regularly around the middle of January, right after students finish a unit on symbolism and Romanticism using The Scarlet Letter. The content I need to cover is as follows:

1.) A unit on Naturalism, with Ethan Frome as the central text.
2.) A unit on PSSA/SAT/AP test prep with The Great Gatsby as the central text.
3.) A research-paper writing unit in which students write the first draft of their senior research paper. The paper must be 8-10 pages, and should be on a "hot topic" in students' field.
4.) A unit on McCarthyism/Cold War Literature using The Crucible as the central text.
5.) A unit focused on A Separate Peace
6.) Students should be using the critical lenses that we've learned so far (Psychoanalytic, Marxist, Feminist, Architypical) and should learn more (Formalist, New Historicist).
7.) Students have a vocabulary goal for the end of the year, so I need to incorporate frequent lessons building student vocabulary and vocabulary decoding skills.
8.) In my Reading Improvement class, I hope to introduce weekly "book talks" to help them with their independent reading book reports for next semester.

I'm working on ways to do these units creatively and well, but it's not as easy as one might think. Right now, I'm using winter break (what remains of it) to re-read the books I'll be using as central unit texts (The Scarlet Letter, Ethan Frome, The Great Gatsby, The Crucible, and A Separate Peace). I'm really looking to think about critical lenses, as well as the vocabulary goals the students have, in planning each unit I'll be teaching, but I'm not sure exactly how to approach that, and what other texts I can bring in with each novel--probably only about two short stories/poems that are thematically related to the book topics, or are related as far as the time in which they were written.

For Ethan Frome, I think I want students to be thinking about the critical lenses they've learned so far (Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism), but I also want to introduce them to Formalism and New Historicism. And though I think a Marxist of Feminist reading would fit well with the book, the resource I have provides materials/scaffolds only for Formalist, Feminist, and Mythological/Archetypical readings. I really wanted my students to think about labor, isolation, and modernity, and I was thinking of pairing it with Tillie Olson's "I Want you Women up North to Know," so students could see the labor behind modernization, and so they could read some American lit that represents a part of America other than that North of Pennsylvania (so far they've been pretty stuck in New England, and that won't be changing much in the upcoming semester). Although the time periods are different, it touches (perhaps, though perhaps I'm wrong...) on similar themes.

I was also thinking of pairing it with "The Yellow Wallpaper," a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman that was published closer to the same time as Ethan Frome and deals with some of the same themes of women and psychology or medicine. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," a women who apparently suffers from something akin to postpartum depression and is being subjected to the "rest cure" for "hysterical" women. It would be a good place to introduce students to the idea of hysteria, popular attitudes towards middle-class and upper-class women at the turn of the twentieth century, and the emphasis on the passivity of women; I might also use clips from Sweeney Todd, to show students a more modern interpretation to early-twentieth-century attitudes towards women/"madness." (The latter text has only just occurred to me, and, so, requires some more thought). Of course, which direction I go with the text/its fellow texts depends on what my goal for the unit is, and I suppose a student investigation of social class and modernity might wait until they're reading Gatsby, so an investigation of early-twentieth-century understandings of women and illness might be better suited for this text. Perhaps I can focus students on a feminist reading and hold off on other critical lenses until we read other texts?

As far as Gatsby is concerned, I'm sort of at a loss as to the direction I might take it. We're using the book and the accompanying resources in which the school district has invested to prepare students for the PSSA's and, in my case, the SAT's and the AP test. This means a heavy emphasis on using PSSA-modeled assessments. I'm frustrated by this, but I think I have a plan of attack. The materials we have provide PSSA-modeled assessments for each chapter, and a final assessment that is 100 questions long that students are to go through at the end of the book. My plan--if my MT agrees to it, of course--is to administer the first two chapter tests early (after students have read the first 2 chapters, of course), find the skills that students are not doing well with--vocabulary, inferences, etc--and teach lessons on those skills separately, test students intermittently, tracking their progress on each of the skills I'm targeting, and see how they improve. Then, I'll see if those improvements are reflected on the final assessment. I'm sure I can come up with some fun non-PSSA-test-question activities to help students build skills in decoding vocabulary, characterization, inferences, etc. I'd also like to have a unit focus other than "test prep," and I'd like to have students thinking about social class in a book that I think it's super important to deal with, but we'll see what happens with that...

For A Separate Peace, I won't be introducing the book, another teacher in the department will be introducing students to the text, so I'll have to be somewhat flexible, but I really want students to think about masculinity. Since we'll have spent so much time talking about Feminism and how women are depicted in American lit, it will be important and refreshing, I think, to investigate how men/boys are depicted and what social expectations for boys/men are/were. Not sure what texts to pair with this one yet...

As far as The Crucible, I haven't finished the play yet (I know, it's crazy that I've gone this long without reading it), but the resources I have for critical lenses suggest Feminist, Psychoanalytic, and Mythological/Archetypical (the same lenses they suggest for reading The Scarlet Letter, incidentally), and my MT says she typically reads the text allegorically, to think about McCarthyism. So I hope to do something fun with that. It's much later in the semester, and I probably won't be teaching it, so I haven't given it much thought yet.

What I'm really excited about is the role I'll get to play in students' research papers. They have no assigned topic except that they must research "a hot topic in their field," which I don't know that I care for, since, at 16, I didn't know what my "field" would be with any certainty, but I think it's meant to link to their senior projects. Anyways, I have tons of ideas for this unit (I wish I could just skip over Ethan Frome and just get students started on research right away!), but I'm still not sure about the cohesion of it all. I want to use the writing workshop type model, start students off journaling about possible topics, working with partners or small groups to select a topic, do research, compile a preliminary list of outside sources they might wish to use, which they'll turn in to me so I can guide their research to credible sources (I'll have a lesson, or at least a mini-lesson on distinguishing credible sources). Then I'll ask students to come up with some sort of organizational structure--sub-sections, an outline, an abstract, or something--then a rough draft which they'll peer-review in pairs or small groups, at which point I really want to hold individual writing conferences, and then a final draft. I'm still shaky on how well all of these steps will go, how much I'll have to prepare students for each step, etc, but I'm really excited to get started with it.

As for the vocabulary goal, I want to touch on it frequently--maybe weekly?--because I think it isn't separate from the unit goals I have for the books/texts students will be working with. I plan to start out by pulling vocabulary words that I think students will need to know from Ethan Frome, then asking students what the words mean, and going through the steps of determining the definition [prefixes, suffixes, roots, context clues, and, finally, if all else fails, the OED (Oxford English dictionary)], but I don't want to be the one continually responsible for finding the vocabulary words. I think it would be far more authentic if students brought in words they didn't know and talked us through how they determined the definitions. I want to make sure students actually do this, though, so I'll have to come up with some sort of accountability measure--points, a grade, etc--and I'll also have to pick out words for each chapter, as well, so that if students don't touch on a word, I can see if it's because they already know the word, or because they couldn't easily find the meaning, or just because they didn't get to it. I'm wondering how to do this most effectively--each student assigned a chapter? All students must find at least 1 or 2 words a chapter? Groups of students for each section?--but I think it'll be a good, unit-goal-related, effective strategy for teaching vocab (better than a worksheet, at least).

And as for the Reading Improvement students who I've hardly interacted with this semester (because my MT doesn't think they'll respond well to me, since they've bonded with her), I'll be starting out by introducing book talks. I plan on giving the first one, maybe asking my MT to give one, but I really want students to be center stage for this activity. This may not be easy, because the students have an independent reading assignment each 1/2 of the year, and many students didn't do their independent reading, or waited until the last possible minute to do it. Now, the students are struggling readers, so that certainly plays a part. But I know they read--we all do, in today's society, in one way or another. I just have to figure out how to get them talking about their reading.

I was thinking about starting out by giving a book talk about Maus or some graphic novel, so I can get students thinking about alternative texts and keep them from getting stuck in the "school reading" mindset. I don't know if I want to open up the option to talk about movies, in part because I already know they're watching movies, and they can write and talk about movies in other assignments, perhaps, but for the purposes of this activity, I want them thinking about reading written words. However, I was thinking about letting them use songs. I'd ask them to bring a written copy of the lyrics for me and all their peers, and then I'd let them play it (songs would have to be school-appropriate, of course) and talk about why they like it. I'd use this as a first step to getting them talking about texts they read and that are important to them, but then I'd ask them to also talk about books specifically in later book talks, I think--mainly because they can't do their independent reading book report on a movie or a song, but can do it on a literary book, YA book, or graphic novel.

Anyways, these are the ideas I'm working with for my upcoming units. If anyone has suggestions for how to teach vocab, test prep, or research skills effectively, or ideas for unit foci for the various books I'll be teaching, or ideas for texts that would pair well with these books, I'd really love to hear your ideas. If I've said anything that I want to try that you think absolutely WON'T work, I'd love to hear that, too, before I try it and it blows up in my face.

I think there will be a shift in my blog posts at this point. I'll still talk about theory and pedagogy, I imagine, but I'll also be a lot more concerned with my practice, how to make lessons/units work, how to adjust when they don't work, etc.

Half Way to Real Teacher-hood: Where I've Been

I suppose I've been neglecting this blog of late, but that's not to say that I've been doing any less reflecting on teaching, theory, practice, etc. (See the last three blog posts, which are final reflections for various classes I've been taking this semester). However, I wanted to take this opportunity to look back on the last semester, summarize what I've done in my placement, and think ahead to what I'll be asked to do starting in January.

The first lesson I taught was one meant to open a unit on the Enlightenment. I asked students to do something of a think-pair-share to brainstorm ideas they had about what the Enlightenment was, and what factors in American society led up to the Enlightenment. From this lesson, I can see the beginning of a pattern that later emerged in my teaching lab, when I planned lessons for my peers. I LOVE think-pair-share. Even without intending to, I've noticed that I frequently model a large portion of my lessons around this pattern. For those of you who don't know, think-pair-share activities involve students first thinking about the answer to a problem, a question, or knowledge they have about a subject, character, author, or book. They first think/write individually on the topic, then share what they've written with a partner or small group, then we have a whole-class discussion, that can either function as something of a debate/discussion, or might be a place to accumulate the knowledge of all groups and appropriate it as class knowledge. This sequence of activities seems really natural to me and, as I've said, frequently finds its way into my lesson plans.

That said, I need to also really focus on ensuring that this model fits my lesson well. For example, for the activity I did with students about the Enlightenment, it may not be the best model. I relied on student comfort and ease at recalling knowledge related to the Enlightenment without sufficiently front loading them--as the video I took of my enactment of the lesson makes clear, there were many students who weren't sure about what/when the Enlightenment actually was; I asked them to hypothesize what social forces might be at work during the Enlightenment based on what they'd read about the Puritans and what they knew about the founding fathers and the American Revolution, but I still feel there may have been a better way to familiarize students with Enlightenment thought (probably something like the activities I did to introduce Literary Criticism/critical lenses to students, which I'll get to shortly)

The next couple of lessons I taught were introducing and facilitating a paper students wrote around the idea of social contracts. Students had generally studied social contract theory and had examined the Declaration of Independence as an example of a social contract, which they had briefly contrasted with the social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. For this unit, I designed the writing prompts students used to compose their own social contracts. I (attempted to) differentiate(d) the prompts, so students had the option to engage more closely with the texts/thinkers we'd examined in class, write about their school community, or write about their own personal beliefs about society more creatively. I also was able to work with my MT to design a rubric, co-design a grammar lesson to help students enhance their writing quality and sentence complexity, and plan and enact a peer revision lesson in which I modeled the type of feedback we expected students to give one another and then gave them a clearly guided worksheet to help modeled after the rubric to focus their feedback on the aspects of the papers that would be graded for.

I felt really good about my involvement in this unit. I prepared students for the activity by asking them to imagine the types of protections, rights, and restrictions they felt were most important for the welfare of society and that they would enact if they were in charge of designing the social contract by which society was governed. Interestingly, though I intended this activity to be something of a process drama, it ended up falling into the think-pair-share model as well. I then introduced students to the three options that they had for their writing project.

From this unit, I learned that (at least in my estimation) I have a particular talent for designing and facilitating student writing projects. I had a lot of fun writing the prompts, working with my MT to design the rubric and working on student writing by introducing complex sentences and peer revision. I would love to work with student writing much more (and I'll get the chance to, since I'm in charge of students' research paper unit, which I'll describe in greater detail later). I feel like this is the area I'm most comfortable (probably due to my special proclivity for writing, and my experience at the Penn State writing center) and where I sense the most possibilities for creative instruction.

I did learn some things, though, that I think will inform my future writing instruction. I actually used this unit, and the peer revision lesson in particular, for my teaching writing class, where I showed a clip of my modeling activity (I modeled the type of feedback I expected to see students giving to one another with a paragraph I quickly wrote up and commented on) and got some feedback about how I could improve the lesson/unit/student writing generally. After spending some time thinking about it and the advice of my peers, I think I would expand the time I spent introducing the prompts to students, spending several minutes introducing each option and leaving plenty of time for student questions, and perhaps even assigning an exit ticket that asks students to write a summary of what they think they might write in response to the assignment, and asks them to write any questions they have about the assignment.

I would also check in with (formatively assess) students more frequently and more fully --for this unit, I checked in half way through the process to ensure they had a rough draft, but I only checked for completion, I didn't read over the drafts in enough detail, so some student responses to the prompt were off topic and didn't reflect the student learning re: social contracts that they were meant to. Furthermore, I want to work with student participation in peer revision sessions more, so that I can help students be better readers of each others' compositions; I want students to be able to catch a peer's off-topic paper before it's turned in, for instance, which didn't happen this time.

The final unit in which I participated heavily was one on critical lenses/literary criticism. I introduced students to the concept of literary criticism via a PowerPoint presentation, and then had students work in groups to jigsaw psychoanalytic literary theory and marxist literary theory, as applied to Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" and Emerson's "Self Reliance." The way it worked (for those of you who aren't familiar with jigsaw, especially) was that students were divided up into groups (2 groups in my smaller classes, 4 in my large class) and one group (or two, in the case of my large 8th period class) viewed and took notes on a presentation about marxist literary theory, then completed a worksheet that guided students through a marxist reading of "Civil Disobedience," in which students determined whether or not Thoreau's disobedience constituted a Marxist-style revolution. They viewed the presentation one day, took notes on the theory, and came up with the essential vocabulary and key tenants of the theory, and the next day they worked with their group members to go through the "Civil Disobedience" worksheet. The other group(s) viewed a presentation on psychoanalytic literary theory one day and completed a worksheet that guided them through a psychoanalytic reading of "Self Reliance," which asked the students to assign an aspect of Freud's model of personality (ego, superego, id) to the author of the text and use quotes from the text to justify their reading. Then, each student was paired up with a partner from another group, so that they taught their partner about their theory. In this way, students learned about one theory as part of a group, then were introduced to the other theory by a student from the other group, so all students were introduced to both theories.

In the end, I feel really good about this lesson; my expertise was valuable, because I went from group to group to field questions, clarify points about the theories, question students' readings of the texts they were dealing with, etc. However, students were the ones responsible for guiding their own learning. It was a really student-centered few lessons, and I feel like students worked much harder to understand the theories than they would have if they hadn't been responsible for teaching them to a peer later. I'd like to use jigsaw-like activities more in the future, and I'd like to keep using literary criticism, and introduce students to feminist, new historical, formalist, and post-colonial theories in the future as well, with similar types of activities. I was so impressed with the sophisticated readings of texts that the activities produced.

So I think, all in all, looking back on what I've done with my classes this semester, I've got some really strong material to work with for next semester. It promises to be really tough, though, because obviously I haven't been prepared for every type of lesson or assignment I might have to assign or teach, so, though I've learned a lot from where I've been, there's still a lot to think about with regard to where I'm headed this upcoming semester But, based on the sheer length of this entry, I'm going to save the details of my upcoming semester, ideas, challenges, and questions for another post. We'll see what the future holds; I'm nervous and terrified, but also excited and really looking forward to learning a lot!

Final Reflection for my Lesson Planning Class

Over the course of the semester, the difficulties and complexities of lesson planning and enactment have become much plainer to me. I feel as though I’ve learned a great deal about myself as a teacher-to-be through planning lessons for books on a variety of levels.

Mainly, this class revealed to me that being a good teacher and achieving learning goals is about more than just planning strong or thoughtful lessons. Although some of my lessons could have been more fully planned, I feel that planning is one of my strong suits. However, enacting a plan is much more challenging. It’s not like writing and then presenting a speech; lesson planning and enacting is so much more difficult, because a plan has to be detailed enough that every minute is used purposefully, but it must also be flexible because student engagement is critical to learning, and you can’t plan for what students are going to say, what questions they’re going to have, etc.

Even so, I feel that the most well-planned lesson I taught this semester was my Kite Runner lesson. I designed handouts and carefully selected graphic organizers that would focus on student thinking about the book. Perhaps the reason I planned this lesson so well was that I was so interested in the book and was fairly excited about the unit focus we’d selected, though most of my peers took it in a different direction than I had imagined. I saw the unit as an examination of the ways the personal and the political worked together in the lives of the characters in the book, but most of the “external conflicts” we talked about were just interpersonal conflicts. I don’t know if this discrepancy was due to my failure to understand exactly what the unit goal had been, or just my different way of interpreting it, or if the unit focus we selected wasn’t clear enough to guide the lessons. Regardless, I think if I were teaching the book/unit in a real classroom, I would do more to draw students’ attention to the political as well as the personal influences that shape each character’s behavior, and perhaps have students think about the ways personal and political conflicts drive their lives.

I think that my two weakest lessons were my Out of the Dust and my The Glory Field lessons. Again, this may be because I was less enthusiastic about the texts and unit foci, or because I was less knowledgeable about the cognitive abilities of the students who would be reading this book—namely junior high students. I never enacted my Glory Field lesson, but I think I would like to re-do my Out of the Dust lesson and perhaps provide a little bit more direction. I was trying to approach the unit focus, looking at place in writing, while being true to the content of my section, which focused more on people. I tried to draw students’ attention to the ways in which objects or symbols in the spaces in the book stood in for people, but I think I did a poor job of explaining this. If I were to go back, I think I would spend more time modeling what I was trying to get at, as several of my peers suggested after viewing the lesson.

I suppose these lessons exemplify what my weaknesses in planning were at the beginning of the semester, because I was really uncomfortable modeling or spending extended periods of time talking. I feel like students should be doing as much of the thinking and talking as possible in a lesson, but it’s hard for me to remember that students, especially middle school students, would need some guidance—they need me to direct their thinking in some ways, and to show them what the type of thinking I’m looking for might look like. I understand the importance of giving additional guidance now, but I still struggle with how much and how frequent that guidance should be. This is because what I see as my greatest weakness in lesson planning now is continual formative assessment. I always have students working on something—usually working in groups, completing worksheets that guide their thinking about the question at hand, or just responding to questions, but how do I collect data about student learning, as the teacher, throughout the lesson?

It was good for me to see how my peers worked out some of these problems themselves, too. As I mentioned, they often interpreted unit foci differently than I did, so it was worthwhile to see the range of possibilities available to me. But what was perhaps more helpful was the opportunity to see the ways some of my peers, who do work with younger student, took up the tasks of planning for the books aimed at younger students. One of my peers in particular seems to me like she will be really good at engaging her 9th graders in ways I would struggle with. Her bingo game, for example, was a great tool to use to motivate younger students, and to formatively assess their understanding of literary concepts. And although I think One of my peers’ visualization activity could have been better executed, the idea of a visual representation of a reading was a really interesting one, and one that could help me track students’ understandings of the passages they’re reading, while they thought about their understandings as well.

Also, reading Peter Smagorinsky was, of course, a really useful guide in unit planning. The type of conceptual units he describes, and the process for planning them, was really a challenging one to work with throughout the semester, but any time I was stuck trying to plan a lesson, I thought back to “okay, what’s their unit assessment going to be? And how can I prepare them for that? And what activities can I do to support that learning?” and while I wasn’t always successful, and it didn’t always make the lesson planning any easier, it did make it more purposeful and thoughtful.

Because I was able to return to Smagorinsky when planning my lessons, I think that typically I was successful in planning lesson sequences that supported learning goals. Whether the ways the lessons actually played out actually supported the learning goals was a different story. Sometimes an activity that seemed so structured in my head—like having students compare groups in TKR and think about the conflicts between the groups—didn’t play out that way in the lesson, probably because, given the slightly different direction of my unit focus from my peers’, I didn’t adequately activate students’ prior knowledge—they weren’t primed to think in the way I was asking them to think. This is why I’ve come to think that the “thinking through a lesson” portion of the Pitt lesson plan can be useful, though I’m not always able to anticipate the difficulties that students would have (as in the case of TKR). But, to work on this, I need to work on formative assessment, so I’m always checking in to see if student learning is happening as planned and, if not, adjusting my instruction to ensure that it does.


1.) I think that my greatest strengths as far as lesson planning are, as I mentioned, coming up with activities that are meant to specifically support the learning goals I set for the lesson. In my TKR lesson, I directed student thinking to the conflicts at play in the novel. In my Out of the Dust lesson, having students look through the text for specific objects that related to characters worked well to direct their thinking about people and place early in the text. And in my Curious Incident lesson, guiding students to examine representations of normalcy in the media and then compare and contrast them with the text worked well to prepare students to think critically about representations of normalcy. Each of these lesson sequences could have been more perfectly executed, but the plan, I think, was well-suited to the goals I’d set.

2.) However, with regard to areas in which I still need to grow, two come to mind. The first is in my ability to come up with motivating activity. I almost always start students out with a quick write, which I think can sometimes be motivating, but when done over and over again, can probably become routine, thoughtless, and dull. So I need to work on motivating activities, which I really struggle with. The other area in which I can continue to grow is formative assessment. It’s not enough to collect exit tickets at the end of class to see if students “get it.” I need to have spaces in my lesson where I can reliably check for understanding and monitor student learning, and students can be made aware of their own learning, as well.

3.) If I had to select only two goals for my development in planning lessons for the Spring, they would be, I suppose, to come up with a greater variety of ways to get students situated in English class than just doing quick writes, and to create a space and a means for formative assessment to happen throughout my lessons rather than just at the end of class.

Philosophy of Writing Instruction

Here is the link to a screencast presentation of my philosophy of writing instruction.

These are the sources from which I used in presenting my philosophy of writing:

Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). Writing Next: effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high school. Carnegie Corporation of New York.
This report details the author's meta-analysis of writing research, isolating 11 research-backed practices that, if used in middle and high school classrooms, have been shown to improve student writing.

Kittle, P. (2008). Write beside them: risk, voice, and clarity in high school writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Ms. Kittle describes the ways in which she has used writing workshops in her classroom. She details each step in the writing process, and the way she models the process for student by "writ[ing] beside them," demonstrating the steps a writer goes through in crafting a piece. She also talks about her use of published works as models of PRODUCT, vs. her modeling of PROCESS. She also details the importance of transparency in writing instruction, explaining why each step is important for her writing instruction.

Murphy, C., & Sherwood, S. (2008). The St. Martin's sourcebook for writing tutors (3rd ed.). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.
A handbook for peer tutors in a University writing center. This book focuses on inquiry-based peer revision sessions in which students working on their writing cite their own areas of strength and weakness and guide the peer revision session as much as possible. Tutors use questions rather than statements to guide writers to consider specific effects and points in their work.

Smagorinsky, P., Johannessen, L., Kahn, E., & McCann, T. (2010). The dynamics of writing instruction: a structured process approach for middle and high school. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Smagorinsky and colleagues explain possible ways to teach various common genres of school writing in effective ways that focus on a "structured process approach," in which students are able to develop their own writing through their own writing style, but have the necessary scaffolding to do so successfully.

Final Reflection for my Course on Litearature and Media

Question: How do we reflect on our practices as critical educators of literature, language, and media?

Reflection: Over the course of the semester, we’ve been bombarded with mental stimuli from all directions, and we’ve been asked to reflect on the practices and genres we’ve been learning about as we’ve been learning, and to reflect on the feedback we’ve been receiving as we’ve been receiving it. In Lit and Media in particular, we’ve been learning briefly about tons of potential literacy practices and genres of media, and we’ve been reflecting on how we might teach them or use them in our own classrooms. However, the question of how we reflect on our practices is one that perhaps hasn’t been sufficiently addressed. Given the frequency with which we’re asked to reflect on our practices, the question of how best to do that merits some consideration.

Deborah Appleman (2010) described the process she went through when reflecting on her role as a reading teacher, so in that sense, she might serve as a model. When we read her text at the very beginning of the semester, I thought about what my role as an English teacher might be, and it made sense that teaching students to read—words, pictures, videos, or any number of texts—was most certainly a part of my role; Appleman made perfect sense. However, reflecting on my own practice proves more difficult.

In the “Classroom Connections” activities I completed for this class, I dealt with reflecting on my own practice as well. How had the strategies I implemented met the goals I had set out for them? Where did they fall short? Why did they fulfill the goals they were meant to, or fall short? I suppose these are good beginnings to reflections on my practice, but there’s a missing step, it seems, and it’s one I’ve danced around all semester, we’ve talked about in class to some extent, and I’m only now coming to any sort of an answer to: Why did I set the goals I set for the practice in the first place?

Dealing with this question, I think, is of critical importance, because how we set the goals of our classes is at the heart of our pedagogical identity. If I see my classroom as one in which I train students to be capable employees or prepared college students or master test takers, my instructional goals are going to be very different than if I see my classroom as a space for open inquiry and criticism of the social forces behind the texts we’re studying. My classroom, I hope, will fall into this latter category. But at what level should I stop reflecting?

In the other classes in this program, we read Peter Smagorinsky’s texts about unit planning—setting instructional goals, planning how best to assess those goals, determining learning goals for lessons that will prepare students for their assessment, and planning activities that will meet the learning goals of the lesson, so that students are sufficiently scaffolded to complete their unit assessment successfully. Much of our reflection in Lit and Media--our discussions of different genres or critical lenses, for example—has been on these levels. Some of the texts we’ve read have offered practical suggestions or sample lessons, while others have expounded upon the importance of various genres in the curriculum, the larger social issues the genres can speak to, etc.

When reflecting on our practice, then, should we be focusing on whether our learning goals were aligned with our assessments? Should we be focusing on ensuring that our goals for student learning match up with the pedagogies/ideologies we’ve established about the role of English Education in student lives, in our school communities, or in society at large? Or should we be reflecting on the validity of the pedagogy/ideology that guides our classroom, critically examining the assumptions we make every day about our students, our discipline, our world, and ourselves?

Like so many other questions we’ve raised this semester, I don’t claim to have a final answer to this question. As I’ve mentioned, the authors we’ve read this semester have dealt, really, with all of these levels of reflection, and I’m sure that each of them is important. But trying to balance all of them, reflect on all of them at any given time, at least at this stage in our teaching careers, can be totally overwhelming, at least for me. So is there a balance to be struck? I think that, most likely, this balance varies from educator to educator, from classroom to classroom, and from year to year and even day to day. But I also know that only once I started thinking about my role, my goals as an educator, I became more engaged and more motivated. Once I began reflecting on my own motives and reasons for the goals I’ve set as an educator and the role I see myself playing, I became excited again about the empowering possibilities of literacies, and that level of reflection motivated me when reflecting on my success or failure at managing behavior in a classroom or aligning formative assessments with learning goals had me totally bogged down.

And our inquiry discussions in class, at times, have addressed these questions. When we talk about the role of “dangerous” texts like Do The Right Thing, or of “dangerous” topics like violence, sexuality, race, or religion, we’ve been talking around how we see our role as educators, or the role of an English classroom, or the English teacher.

So, how do we reflect on our practices as critical educators of literature, language, and media? Again, I don’t think this class has brought me to a single conclusion, but it has highlighted the importance of reflection on a number of levels. Without “meta-reflection,” reflection on the ideology/ies behind the rationales, though, I think something is missing. It is at this level that I ought to begin, I think, to understand why I set the unit goals, or lesson-level learning goals that I set, or why I select the genres or texts that I select. This level of awareness will, if I can maintain it, make me a more responsible, and more accountable educator, and for this reason, this level of reflection is a necessary step in my reflection on my practice.

Might the Fear of Teaching be the Beginning of (Teacherly) Wisdom?

Okay, so I've been thinking a lot about everything I've talked about and thought about so far, and what I've identified as my (perhaps trite and simplistic) understanding of my obstacles to becoming a worthwhile educator is fear.

I had a student this week say some things that made me afraid--not afraid for me, really, but for him, and for the other students in the class who interact with him. And this really drove home for me some of the real challenges I'm going to face as a teacher. But this isn't the extent of it.

Let me go over some of the fears I have, going into teaching:

1.) The fear of inadequacy. I'm sure we all feel this from time to time, whether we're student-teachers or veteran educators. But it's a paralyzing fear, nonetheless. Sometimes, when I'm planning a lesson I'll be presenting in my placement, I'm almost paralyzed with fear. Concerns run through my mind: Is this topic going to be relevant to students? Will it help them meet their educational goals, whatever those might be? Will it help them to become more critical consumers of the world around them? Is it pedagogically sound? Is it internally consistent? Will it be accessible to students--not over their heads, but not too simple for them, either? Will I be able to implement it well? Am I expert enough in the content to be able to field any questions students might have? Can I give directions clearly? Are my estimates of the instructional time for each activity close approximations? Am I going to be running out of time, especially if I have to take time to manage behavior issues? Will I even be effectively prepared to handle behavior issues at all?

2.) The fear of unethical or ideologically questionable motives. I often, for my own sake, try to articulate why I want to be a teacher, what kind of teacher I want to be, and why. And I come up with extensive lists--Because I love reading and writing and, as an adolescent, found them to empower me in a way that, probably, nothing else could have, and I want to share the power and connectedness of the written word with students; Because I'm concerned about social inequities that exist in our society and I want to make our nation's youth aware of them, in an effort to create a critical and responsible generation of citizens; Because I believe that an English classroom should be so much more than what it too often seems to be--a place to learn formulaic rules about language and composition that are often archaic and usually function as tools to keep some people in power and most people marginalized...I want to be the kind of teacher who pushes students, and demands a great deal from them, but who also appreciates their contexts and perspectives; the kind of teacher who wants to work with the "challenging" students, because they're too often marginalized and deserve to have their perspectives heard and understood; the kind of teacher who is passionate about every single skill set or text she teaches, and who wants to share that passion with students.

Of course, whether or not I'm the caliber of person necessary to become this type of educator, and whether or not my preservice year is preparing me for this goes back to the fear of inadequacy. But my fear here is that these motives, these goals, are just the ones I tell myself I have, and, in reality, I fell into teaching some other way and have simply justified it to myself. Perhaps I felt there was little else I was qualified to do with a B. A. in English, since the challenging life of the professional writer is fairly intimidating. Perhaps the idea of having summers off to pursue further education in English was a factor, too. It's so hard for me to tell what considerations came first. And is my desire to work with marginalized students, particularly those in low-SES urban settings a misplaced sense of superiority, like I'm some savior figure that can come in and save these unfortunate students? I struggle with this consideration, in particular, because of another fear.

3. The fear of too-high aspirations--though I don't know if that's really a good way of putting it. Is it right for me to (believe that I) want to teach to marginalized, struggling students? Or does my desire to do this type of work come from a belief that they need extra help, my help? For what? To become upwardly socially mobile? I don't think this is the goal of education, but is it not my students' (present and future) goal? If it is, shouldn't it be my goal? Or would saying something like "you need to learn to read and write well so you can go to college and get good jobs" (which is not what I believe, I don't think, but is perhaps what many students and parents, and certainly several educators and policy-makers might say) just de-value where the students come from? And can I even say that students "come from" a place, or does that generalize in a harmful way, and blind me to students' individual situations? In any case, what it comes down to is, am I aiming to work with "at risk" youth because I think they need my help? If so, isn't that a horrible, condescending thing to think? And won't that attitude, even on a subconscious level, make me a bad teacher? But what's the alternative? Teach students whose social status is more "like mine?" As if that's an option, ethically or just realistically? And how do I uncover prejudices I might have, combat them, and still function as a good educator? Can I even do this (see #1, the fear of inadequacy)

4. The fear of saying the wrong thing(s). This fear is closely related to #3. How do you show that you genuinely care about students, respect them as individuals--many of them as adults, care about their contexts and their perspectives, but still manage their behavior, ask them to do things that they don't necessarily care about or want to do, or that might be useless or even harmful to them? Should I be asking them to do things they don't see the value in? Is it my job to make them see the value in a task? What if they don't buy into my explanation of its importance? How do I create rigorous expectations for my students while still validating their literacies, experiences, and interests? How do I push back on students thoughts and statements without seeming confrontational or authoritative? And maybe the biggest challenge of all: how do I make my students successful students and citizens whilst simultaneously making them totally critical consumers of the world around them? How do I prepare them for PSSA's while still allowing them the space to challenge the test makers and the school administrators and the policy makers? How do I prepare them to enter the work force and negotiate job seeking skills while teaching them to interrogate the validity of corporate rhetoric or media images? If I do only one and neglect the other, I'll be doing my students and society a disservice. That's a lot of pressure, and those stakes seem pretty high to me.

This is just a beginning. I'm also afraid of living in an urban area, of dealing with the low pay and the tons of work that go with being a teacher. If I get a job in an urban school, I'm going, I know, to be terribly afraid every time I walk from the train station to the school, because of the neighborhood it's in. Right or wrong, I know I'll be afraid. And, supposing I get a job teaching high school english in Newark, for instance, and I walk in to a classroom of 25-35 on-level 10th or 11th grade students. I'm going to be afraid. No matter how much I tell myself to be confident, I know I'm going to start out being afraid. How can I manage a classroom like that? Will the students respect me? Will I come across as uppity, or worse? AM I uppity or worse? Can I teach those students effectively? Without being overwhelmed by the difference between their lives and mine--a difference that would be shocking based on the different setting alone? Will I make unfair assumptions? Will I say something really horrible and offensive to a student without realizing it? Will I get mugged on my way to the train station?

These are fears that I wish I didn't have, that I know might be based on a whole slew of factors, ranging from my own ignorance to seriously valid concerns. The hard part is drawing the lines to determine which fears are founded and which are unfounded. But regardless of all that, I think that I sort of came to a conclusion today: what's important isn't whether or not I have these fears--I can't control that. What's important is how I deal with them. Like I said, this might come across as trite and oversimplified, but as long as I acknowledge the fears I have, which I tried to do here, and press on, trying to do what I think it the best I can do in spite of my fears, I think I'm on ethical and responsible ground. And I know I'm going to mess up. Professor X has assured me that all research suggests I'll mess up over and over and over again my first year in particular. And that's REALLY hard to acknowledge, because students don't deserve to be impeded by their novice teachers' mess-ups. But there's no way around it. It's going to happen. All I can do is try to be real with myself and my peers about that, and learn as much as I can, and try as hard as I can. And I have to figure out how to balance different priorities, which will take time.

But anyways, I feel like now that I've named my fears (some of them) I have a little more power over the trajectory of my life and career. And I don't think being afraid makes me a bad teacher (at this point, teacher candidate). On the other hand, I think, to be paralyzed by fear, or to try to avoid certain settings, discussions, or experiences because I'm frightened, would kill me in the proverbial crib. Being an English teacher is risky business, and I'm realizing that, and hopefully learning to deal with that realization.

Write Beside Them

Penny Kittle told me to "write beside them"--my students, that is. And that's something I haven't done, or that I've had a hard time doing, since my life was swallowed up in pedagogy and theory and sales pitches and an empty apartment. But I've been stealing moments and pages, here and there, trying to document my present madness in order to retain my sanity. So I'm not sure if this is what my program director had in mind when she suggested, what seems like an eternity ago but must really have been only 10 weeks, that we might want to keep a blog, a teaching blog, that we could show employers-to-be and peers and could make us a part of a community of professionals. As i said, I don't know if this is what she had in mind, but this is my blog, and I suppose I should lay myself bare if I'm asking my students to do anything of the sort. So here goes.

Today, I was struck by a realization. I've been struggling, really struggling, this semester. It's hard to be bad at something, to be able to talk about what a good teacher is, but not to be one. It might be harder for me than it is for most, because no matter how hard I try to be good at it because I know I should, I'm really bad at handling "constructive criticism." Of course I want to improve, but I don't want anyone but me to figure out how I can. And to hear someone tell me that I need to write better handouts, or communicate more simply and clearly, or to think like an eighth-grader, stings. Really, really hard.

So I've been struggling, trying to make myself wake up in the morning and feel good about what I'm going to do that day, even though I know that between the readings and the reflections and the presentations, I'm spread so thin that, as a novice, I'm just getting ready for a long series of failures that I can analyze with my peers all day and talk about how, some day, we'll be good teachers. That is, one or two of us will, because we've all read, by this point, about the high turn over for beginning teachers. So I wake up every morning in my apartment with no one beside me except for my poor, neglected cat, and I prepare to go out and fail. Over and over and over again. And then to hear people tell me all about my little failures. And it's really, really hard.

But today I realized something that made it a little easier. I was, like any 20th-century-roughly-middle-class-american-girl/woman-in-her-20's, scrolling down my facebook feed for the zillionth time today, and I came across this video, posted under a friend's status--some short poem-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0snNB1yS3IE . The friend who posted it is a student at Susquehana university, and I think at this moment she's living in London. I don't know her all that well--she's a mutual friend of my fiancé's who I've met a hand full of times--but she loves this spoken-word poet that I love, and she follows TED, a group I've recently started following. And I realized that, even though right now, I'm isolated from the world by this wall of university-education-training, I'm still a part of a community.

Yep. I'm a part of (a) communit(y/ies).

A community of (strong) women (who try to be strong). Women who are (as) self-made (as anyone can be), women who work for a living and care about being (as) strong(er) (as/than) any m(a/e)n in their lives, or any (wo)m(a/e)n in their ways, who (want to) build their lives instead of having them built for them. Women who hear the well-intended but frustratingly anachronistic things their brothers and fathers say--about walking down dark alleys at night, living at home [in their fathers' houses], and letting someone take care of them once in a while--and let it roll off their backs like rainwater.

If Luce Irigaray taught me anything, it was what to call the tool gynecologists use to open things--and that anyone worth writing for won't mind working to read what you wrote. If you're still reading so far, than you must be worth writing for, because I mean so many things when I can say only one. Ol' Luce calls this woman-talk (only she says it in French), but I call it me-talk, because I don't think like (a) (wo)m(a/e)n, I think like myself, like only I can, because only I have taken the steps to get me to where I am so I can see (the things/the way) I see.

(We aren't/I'm not) always strong, though I/we always want to be, and often try to be. In fact, I feel weaker than most a lot of the time. When I go to bed early because I've gotta sleep to silence the thoughts in my head, they usually go something like this: I-have-too-few-friends,-too-few-dollars,-too-few-accomplishments,-and-too-many-pounds-of-fat-on-me,-I'm-so-bad-at-communicating/empathizing-to/with-teenagers-maybe-I'm-not-meant-to-teach-(not-that-I'm-"meant"-to-do-anything-because-who-plans-it-but-me--but-then-what-made-me-"mean"-for-myself-to-become-a-teacher?-In-fact,-how-did-I-end-up-here,-anyways?-Is-my-whole-life/identity-the-result-of-coincidence(s)/convenience(s)?-and-if-so-then-why-does-it-feel-like-(such-a-struggle/a-hole-I-keep-trying-to-climb-out-of-only-to-discover-that-no-matter-how-high/hard-I-climb,-there's-still-more-climbing,-and-harder-climbing,-left-to-do)-But-if-i-don't-teach-English,-what-on-earth-should-i-do?-Being-a-stayathomemom-seems-so-much-easier-why-do-i-insist-on-winning-my-share-of-bread--not-that-i'll-do-that-as-a-teacher-anyways-with-the-job-market/world-economy-what-it/they-is/are-so-if-i-can't-do-it,-and-even-if-i-could-i-couldn't-make-a-living,-anyways,-then-why-am-i-bothering?-Do-i-want-to-be-a-teacher?-i'm-so-lost-in-the-cloud-of-rigor/failure-i'm-in-i-can't-remember-anymore-what-i-want-to-do-vs.-what-i-feel-i-must-do.-Am-i-doing-this-for-(all)-the-wrong-reason(s)?-what-even-is/are-the-right-reason(s)?-Does-it-matter-why-i'm-trying-to-do-it-if-i-can't/won't-do-it,-anyways?-maybe-i'm-just-not-trying-hard-enough!-i-should-work-less-hours-so-i-can-be-fully-devoted-to-my-coursework/placement--i-should-work-more-hours(to-make-up-for-my-inability-to-write-the-number-of-sales-i-need-to-earn-the-commission-i-need-to-support-myself)-so-i-don't-have-to-take-out-more-student-loans,-since-i-probably-won't-be-able-to-get-a-job-that-allows-me-to-pay-them-back,-anyways--i-should-make-more-of-an-effort-to-(make-new-friends/stay-connected-with-old-friends)-because-i'm-a-hypocrite-for-talking-about-a-"communityoflearners"-if-i'm-so-socially-withdrawn/isolated/rejected.--what-am-i-even-contributing-to-society/America/my-students/the-World/the-Universe,-anyways?... And it/they go(es) on.

These thoughts are overwhelming, like clouds of locusts eating up all my energy/motivation/life-force. And some days, I'm totally absent from life, my mind running over these doubts over and over and over again, my body occupying a seat in a classroom, my mouth offering lessons to students, but my mind absent, and my heart being eaten away.

But I'm a part of communit(y/ies) and I know that I can battle these doubts. I've got my strong girls behind me, those that I know and love and those who just inhabit the same space(s)/world that I do. I've also got my fellow academics (readers/writers), with their/our thirst for knowledge and wisdom, a thirst that I/they/we can't ever possibly quench, seeking out more and more, greedily, eating up words and ideas, books and letters and websites and conference talks, historical figures and periods and philosophers and writers and authors/poets, slurping down cup after cup of theory and philosophy and discipline-specific/interdisciplinary thoughts. Always, always, always, thinking, puzzling, analyzing, re-thinking.

And educators, who want to give give give students the words, the knowledge, the wisdom that I/we/they love(d) so much, that help(s/ed) us/them/me so much. I/we want students to read/love Shakespeare--or hate him, as long as they've read him, and can have a well-informed, well-argued hatred. Our/my mouth(s) and mind(s) are full of things we want these kids to notice, think about, interrogate, analyze. And we're/I'm disappointed in (our/my)sel(f/ves), not our/my students, when they fail to notice/think about/interrogate/analyze those things (fully).

Black can mean many things, I think, but it can't mean me. And poor can mean many things, but it (probably/usually) doesn't mean me. Man/male can mean a lot, but not me.

Weak and strong and determined and dejected/defeated and hungry and satisfied and beautiful and ugly and thoughtful and diligent and lazy and stupid and cold and damp and short and stubby and meek-and-mild and severe and hypocritical and (full-of/lacking)-integrity and social and reclusive and gentle and bitchy and frightened and cowardly and brave and uncertain and many other things mean me right now.

I'm trying to take things one step at a time. Poetry and novels and music have been great helps to me in this struggle--which makes me think I'm in the right field, because when I was feeling lowest, I asked my friend to feed me poetry, or I listened to a song that moved me, or I read a couple of pages of a novel I'm (trying to) work(ing) my way through. My peers and professors and students all help and hurt me right now, as good peers/professors/students almost certainly should. But, for now, I feel good, I feel like I'm a part of something good, and that I really belong in it, even if I've still got a ways to go...

It was good to get this all off my chest. In one of my classes, on teaching writing, we do quickwrite assignments from time to time, and one of them was a free write. I wrote about the Salem witch trials, and about death-by-crushing, a method of execution for witches at the trials in which more and more weight is put onto someone's body until they are crushed to death. I wrote about how I felt like, every day, more and more weight was being piled on my chest, like so many stones, and that I was sure any minute my rip cage would splinter and I'd be a goner. That hasn't happened. I'm still here. I'm still (roughly) pretty sane. I'm still moving forward. And I feel like writing is helping me take some of the stones off my chest, and better bear the ones that are stuck there. I know that when all this is done, even if I still have a ways to go before I can call myself a good teacher, I know I'll at least be a strong(er) person for the effort.

Obstacles: Self-Doubt, Discouragement, the Whole Bit

(Note: I posted 3 entries today, in backward chronological order. I wrote one, but it was far too long to be one post, so I broke it into 3 parts--this is part 1, the entry about the purpose of (English) teachers and literacy education is part 2, and the entry about my struggles with unit/lesson planning is part 3. Just FYI. But each entry, obviously, stands alone, too)

Well, I've avoided the blog successfully for altogether too long now. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that last week was very discouraging--between a workload from my classes that I thought I'd never be able to manage and co-teaching (which really ended up meaning my mentor teacher teaching while I pretty much stood there) a lesson on complex and compound sentences, I started to lose heart.

Another reason is that this week has been insanely busy and phenomenal. I did a lot of work with a special ed teacher at my placement, which was really useful and enlightening. I planned a lesson on writing in which I got to write to the prompt students are using, model my writing and revision process, and do a peer revision workshop all four periods out of the day. And I got a lot of work out of the way for my Pitt classes, which was a relief. In short, this week, I felt like superwoman, and last week, I guess I felt a little bit more like...oh, I don't know, Eeore, or some other negative-Nancy with a bad self image and a lack of motivation.

I'm saying this to offer explanation for my long break in writing--boy, would Penny Kittle be cross with me! What a far cry from writing every day!--and to give a sense of how pre-student-teaching feels to me, right now, just after finishing week 8 of classes. I mean, I've gone through it all so far--feeling like I'm the best possible teacher candidate in the universe, feeling like I'm not qualified to work with the public at all, much less teach high school students, feeling like the workload I'm presented with through my program is physically impossible to manage, feeling like I can complete all of my work for Pitt, go to work on the weekend, and still have free time to do whatever I want--In short, I've contradicted myself more in the past two weeks than I have probably at any other time in my life. For the first time in my life, I feel like I might really be struggling to learn something. I'm not supposed to be bad at things! At least not things that have to do with school! But, here I am, questioning my ability to become a real, true, quality educator.

And I don't know, really, why that is. No one's telling me that I'm not teacher material. Actually, many of my professors, my Mentor teacher, my University supervisor--she's a retired English teacher who acts as something of a liaison between the University and my placement and makes sure I'm meeting the requirements of both institutions to the greatest possible extent--all are telling me that I'm doing well, that there's a good teacher in the making buried somewhere inside of me for sure. But why don't I feel it?

One of my professors--we'll call her Professor X, just because I think it's fun to use code names--told me that many studies have found that the pedagogy and the strategies and techniques, all the wisdom and knowledge we're accumulating from the zillion-and-a-half researchers and professors and vet teachers that we're reading, whose names I can hardly keep strait, all the feedback we're getting from the phenomenal educators at the University of Pittsburgh, all this training won't really make a difference until our second year of teaching. I don't mean to put words in her mouth, or in the mouths of the researchers who did the study. She wasn't talking about us specifically. She just said that the studies showed that to be the case for the majority of the novice teachers they studied. Still, it's a hard thing to hear. Part of me wants to declare, "No way! Not me! I'm the exception! I'll use understanding-by-design Smagorinsky-modeled inquiry-based units from the beginning of my first day! I'll be building literacy communities from the get-go! There's no way I'll let my students go a whole year without the quality instruction they deserve!" But the truth of the matter is, I know that would be a total lie. I can't even guarantee I'm using best practices in my mentor teacher's classroom, with what feels like (usually) the entire University of Pittsburgh to support me. But it's such a disheartening thing to think I'm going to make a ton of mistakes this semester and next, and not give students the quality of education they deserve. And to think that I might get a job in a real school, with my own classroom and my own students and even--dream upon dreams!--my own curriculum, and I might still spend a whole year floundering around, trying to get my teacher legs, trying to figure out how to do what I'm getting paid to do, what my students are COUNTING on me, DEPENDING on me to do, is totally terrifying and depressing. And what about me that year? It's stressful enough to think I'm not a good teacher after doing it part-time for 8 weeks. If I have to look in the mirror after being a full-time teacher-of-record in a classroom for 6 months, and say, "you know, I still don't really understand this whole teaching thing," I don't know if I'll be able to look at myself at all!

Professor X, if you're reading this, please don't despair! I bear you no ill will for telling me this information--in fact, I'm glad to know it! In my view, knowledge gives you power, and having knowledge, even when it's depressing, discouraging, not-what-I-want-to-hear knowledge, at least I have an idea of what I may have to deal with.

But, in thinking about myself as a teacher, pre-service teacher, future teacher, or whatever, there were a few questions that came to my mind as far as what matters to me, to making me a good teacher, etc.

The Role of the English Teacher and Literac(y/ies) Education

What is an English Teacher? What should (s)he be?

As far as my question about the role of a teacher, I had a couple of conversations with professors, peers, and my mentor teacher in which the idea of student "need" came up. Professor X told us about some of the things that make life unpredictable from year to year--one year, you might have students who work independently and stay on task, for the most part. "Easy" students, generally speaking, to teach. And the following year, you might have a group of students that need a little bit more guidance, scaffolding, or support. This got me thinking about the odd phenomena of student need, and the role of a teacher. Later in the week, my MT (I'm just going to start abbreviating Mentor Teacher as MT because it makes my life much easier. Sorry, this abbreviation probably makes no sense to those of you who aren't pre-service teachers or involved in teacher ed), trying, I think, to be supportive when I perhaps sounded to her like I was doubting myself (who'd ever get the impression that I'd ever do that), said to me of her AP students, "Don't worry, they're good kids. You can't really mess them up." This made me think a minute. I mean, is there a distinction between "bad" kids and "good" kids, "smart" kids and "dumb" kids, students who struggle and those to whom learning comes with a fair degree of ease?

Certainly, all students, of all levels of academic and cognitive ability, all areas of interest, confidence, parental involvement, etc., need good teachers. But I think there's a reason that so few of my peers in my special education class have students in their classes with IEP's. I may be wrong about this--I've done no fact checking whatsoever, and no asking of professors or others in my program--but I suspect that student teachers/interns generally get placed in fairly high-level classes--honors and AP classes. I suspect there are two reasons for this--one is that teachers of AP students perhaps feel more confident that we can't "mess their students up," but I think the main reason is that most student-teachers are placed in classes with teachers who are generally considered to be expert teachers, teachers with a fair amount of experience and who demonstrate competence.

But, wait a minute, if you're reading carefully, you'll notice that there's something a little funny about what I just wrote. The AP kids are the one who student teachers are qualified to teach, because regardless of how much we might stumble, we won't mess up their learning, because they're independent learners. (This is not me making truth statements, but just restating the hypothetical logic that I suspect, perhaps wrongly so, goes into our placement decisions) We also end up in these placements because the teachers are experts who we can sort of apprentice, who have a lot of desirable skills. Have you caught the drift of what I'm suggesting yet

If not, let me be explicit. In my experience, in my placement now and in the high school I attended as a student, the vet teachers, the real "expert" teachers, taught the AP, honors, and academic sections. The new teachers taught the on-level students, or the "vocational" track students. Again, I don't have the studies/research to back me up here, but it seems to me that the best teachers in the biz might be teaching to the students who, supposedly, need them the least. Of course, I'm not suggesting that AP students don't need good teachers. Certainly, I think they do, which is why I worry so much about failing them, not being the teacher they deserve me to be. But don't struggling students, students with IEP's, students with low levels of parental involvement, students from low-SES homes, single-parent homes, working-parent homes--don't they need strong teachers even more? Perhaps they don't. But I do know one thing for nearly certain. Most of the "lower-level" classes at my placement tend to be a lot larger. And the same was true in high school. And, as far as I know, that's a pretty typical pattern to see in urban low-SES schools (again, no research to back that up, so don't take it for truth--I'm basing this on my experience and what I remember hearing, not always the most reliable sources, and they certainly wouldn't stand up to peer review). At the very least, planning for large classes is a big struggle that, in itself, requires expert maneuvering. My point in all of this--and I know I'm slow at getting to it; I told you, I had a LOT of time to think while I was brooding last week and cheering this week and blogging neither week--is that I'm trying to decide where I belong once I finish my program at Pitt. I was thinking, really, truly thinking about teaching at an urban school in NYC for the first couple of years, at least, of my career. My reasoning was that I suspected there was a higher need for talented, committed educators in those schools (and at that time, I still saw myself as potentially talented. Now, I may be revising that idea. I still think I can do it--teach well, that is--but it may take a lot more work than I anticipated) and I had a duty to go to the schools where the need was highest. This, perhaps, is an incredibly, incredibly arrogant thing to think--as if I'm going to spend two years in a school in the Bronx and suddenly the students will realize that they have value and will become scholars and grow up to be congress(wo)men, all thanks to my self-sacrifice. Maybe it is arrogance, but I think it's important for me to work with students who other educators don't want to work with. Maybe it's a misguided feeling--I can't really fully articulate a rationale for it, but I feel that it's important for me to do it, and maybe that's enough, but maybe it isn't. Anyways, regardless of my motives, last week, when I was feeling lower than a bow-legged caterpillar, I was certain that I wasn't qualified to work in an urban school--I was sure that I didn't have the "with-it-ness" (or is it spelled withitness?), the classroom management skills, the rapport-building-skills, the experience with "difficult" students to teach in an urban school. But then, something funny (not in the "hahaha" way, but in the "oh-my-word" way) occurred to me--urban schools are the ones with the job openings, the ones where we, entry-level teachers, are often told we may have to work for a couple of years to gain experience before getting the jobs we "really" want. Shouldn't we be sending our best teachers to our "high-need" students and leaving the ones that "you can't mess up" to the rookies? I don't know how much of my reasoning here is solid logic with facts to back it up and how much is my cynicism coming across, but I know the job I'm going to get as an entry-level professional will not be working with "good" "independent" learners--they're a reward for dealing with the tough kids for enough years, it seems.

Anyways, what this weird little aside comes down to is simply this: I don't know what the role of a teacher is/should be, and I don't know how much that changes based on the "neediness" of a particular group of students. And I don't know if it's even fair to think of urban schools as "high need" schools. Who are we to think they need us? (Those pronouns aren't plural because I have a group in mind, but mostly because I don't want to think of myself as the only arrogant starry-eyed educator to feel this way) Do they, or don't they? Do low test scores mean high need? Are students failing just because they're not doing well academically? Bob Fecho wrote about students in his "urban" school in Philly, which served a largely black and Carribean student body, refusing to "play the game" of standardized tests. (Sorry, I don't have the book with me right this second to give a full citation) I don't know if that can be generalized to all "high-need, low SES, urban" schools, but I know in my placement, many of the students with below basic scores on their PSSA pretests seem smart and engaging enough to me, but they don't want to play the game of school. Is it clear, I wonder, what I mean by that? These students demand authenticity, transparency about purpose. If they're doing worksheets just for the sake of completing a packet and covering a unit, they don't buy it, and they don't care. And then they don't do well, and so teachers give them lower level work. Then, they care even less. And I can't blame them. Is it my job to make them care? (The answer to this question may be different between my pre-service year and my first year teaching)

It all comes down to what English classes should look like, and this was another question I had. A lot of my students don't care about English, because it's hard for them--many of them have learning disabilities that make reading really hard for them--and the purpose isn't clear, so it doesn't seem to be worth the effort it takes. I wish they saw words the way I do. I love words so much, because I use them in so many ways, and I see how much they empower me--they put me in dialogue with experts in Education, many of whom I'll never be able to meet, they help to expose me to so many different world views and cultural perspectives that inform my own and help me see the richness of the world, they help me express myself, understand how I'm feeling when I miss my fiance who's living in NYC but also can't bear the thought of going in to a class I know I don't understand, they help me tell others about my struggles with my teacher prep program and seek insight into my career trajectory, and they help me see through political speeches, media bias, and so much other crap that gets thrown at me daily from all sides (for example, I'm at y brother's house right now, on his computer, totally inside, with the TV off, and I can spot 5 advertisements from where I'm sitting) This awareness gives me power. I want them to have the power of words, too!

But they're not getting it by filling out worksheet packets. Or by not filling out worksheet packets while their teacher shakes her head.

The Purpose of English Class: The Power of Literac(y/ies)

I don't know what the students think the purpose of English class is. I don't know what my placement school or my MT think the purpose of English class is. But I know what the purpose is for me. Making students strong, strong, strong. Showing them how to determine what was influencing the author of a text--living in a racist, sexist society, for example, and either incorporating those assumptions into their texts or pushing against them. Talking to them about how we can read a book to think about history--not the facts of history, but an artifact of a cultural moment. Teaching them to read the world around them with a critical eye. Teaching them how to advocate for themselves, how to actively oppose unfairness without needing violence. I want them so badly to know the power of writing in their own voice, dialoging with themselves through writing to understand themselves. I care so much about English and so much about students. But is this really what English classes are for? Is that what my MT's classroom does? I don't think so. Maybe I'm wrong. About a lot of things I've written here. But I know it's possible to gain autonomy and power from literacy, because I've read parts of Malcolm X's biography, and I've read Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and I've read Virginia Woolf and Luce Irigary and Gloria Anzaldua (forgive the absence of accent marks, I have no idea how to insert them in a blog post. Why can't html cooperate with word processing software keyboard shortcuts?) and so many others who say such brilliant things that people get to read and talk about only because they're written.

These students aren't reading these things, though. So is this a canon war I'm fighting? Or is it a pedagogical one? Or is the "war" a figment of my imagination, and, really, an overreaction to a fairly good education system. (Sir Ken Robinson doesn't seem to think so http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U ) But what do I do about that?

Let's say we can buy my premise that English classrooms are about empowering students with literac(y/ies) skills ( I just got Reading, Writing and Rising Up and Teaching for Joy and Justice, 2 books by Linda Christensen, at the recommendation of a very smart peer/colleague of mine, we'll call her Catherine, and I suspect, though I haven't read them yet, that they may support this premise, as well. She spoke--Linda Christensen, not Catherine--at the PCTELA conference I wrote about last time, and she dealt with this idea a bit) and that my presumption that AP kids are fairly independent learners with a pretty sophisticated repertoire of literacy skills, and that the students not in AP classes--the students in my MT's remedial reading class, for example, with IEP's and low-SES backgrounds, who live in foster homes and haven't been "good at school" in a very long time--aren't getting access to those literacies, which leaves them, in some ways, disempowered. Oughtn't someone step in, and say, "enough, quit cheating these kids out of a fair chance in a game that is, in a lot of ways, fixed against them." Okay, so that's a grossly oversimplified way to think about it, but it conveys the general sense of frustration I feel when I try to negotiate the sophisticated "best practices" I'm learning from Pitt with the students at my placement who just need me to make sure I don't mess up too badly, and with my prospective job options--what I feel I ought to do, would like to do, but don't know if I can do vs. what I think I probably could do but don't feel "called" to do. I know the notion of being "called" to work in an urban school sounds so, again, condescending, and I don't mean it to be. I don't know, perhaps my attitude isn't the right one, and I'd be inauthentic and not confident enough and wouldn't be successful in an urban school as a result of these types of thoughts exactly. But who's going to teach in the cities, then? New teachers waiting for the jobs they really want to open up?

Sorry, this entry really must be laborious to read. It's what I'm thinking right now--back and forth, back and forth, highs and lows, highs and lows--which must be torturous to read--assuming anyone's bothering to read by this point--but maybe it'll put you in my shoes a little. No linear path of logic to follow. Just trying to navigate a minefield of thoughts and doubts and questions without losing all my limbs before getting to the other side.

But, since I'm into the topic of what English classes should look like, I might as well move on to my arch frenemy for the year--unit planning!